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FOLLE-FARINE. 


Ouida’s Works 


Granville de Vigne ...... S2.00 

Strathmore . . ... • • • 2.00 

Chandos ........ 2.00 

Tdalia ........ 2.00 

Under Two Flags ...... 2.00 

Tricotrin ....... 2.00 

Puck ......... 2.00 

Cecil Castlemaine’s Gage . . . . 1.75 

Randolph Gordon ...... 1.75 

Beatrice Boville . . . . . . 1.75 


These Novels are universally acknowledged to be the 
most powerful and fascinating works of fiction which the 
present century, so prolific in light reading, has produced. 

The above are all handsomely and uniformly bound in 
cloth, 1 2mo form, and are for sale by booksellers generally, 
or will be sent by mail, postage paid, on receipt of price by 

J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO., Publishers, 

715 and 717 Market St,, Philadelphia, 


(X/ 


^ ■ 


FOLLE-FARIE'E. 




By OUIDA, 




AUTHOR OF “STRATHMORE,” “CHANDOS,” “ IDALIA,” “ TRICOTRIN,” 
“ GRANVILLE DE VIGNE,” “ UNDER TWO FLAGS,” ETC. 


“ PUCK,” 


» 


“Un gazetier fumeiix qui se croit uu flambeau 
Dit au pauvre quMl a noye dans les ten^bres: 
Oil done Tapergois-tu ce Creatcur dii Beau? 

Ce Redresseur qiie tu celebres?” 

Baudelaire. 


V 



rillLADELPHTA: 

,T. B. LIPPINCOTT & 

1871 . 


CO. 


r 


Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1871, by 
J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO., 

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington. 


> 


A 

D’INGRES. 


PEINTRE-POETE 



# « 


\ 

\ • \ 


p 


I 



FOLLE-FARINE. 


BOOK I. 


CHAPTER 1. 

Not the wheat itself; not e^en so much as the chaff ; 
only the dust from the corn. The dust which no one 
needs or notices ; the mock farina which flies out from 
under the two revolving circles of the grindstones ; the 
impalpable cloud which goes forth to gleam golden in 
the sun a moment, and then is scattered — on the wind, 
into the water, up in the sunlight, down in the mud. 
What matters ? who cares ? 

Only the dust : a mote in the air ; a speck in the light; 
a black spot in the living daytime; a colorless atom in 
the immensity of the atmosphere, borne up one instant 
to gleam against the sky, dropped down the next to lie 
in a fetid ditch. 

Only the dust : the dust that flows out from between 
the grindstones, grinding exceeding hard and small, as 
the religion which calls itself Love avers that its God 
does grind the world. 

“ It is a nothing, less than nothing. The stones turn ; 
the dust is born ; it has a puff of life ; it dies. Who 
cares ? No one. Not the good God ; not any man ; not 
even the devil. It is a thing even devil-deserted. Ah, 
it is very like you,” said the old miller, watching the 
millstones. 

Folle-Farine heard — she had heard a hundred times, — 
and held her peace. 

Folle-Farine : the dust; only the dust. 

As good a name as any other for a nameless creature. 
The dust, — sharp-winnowed and rejected of all, as less 

( 9 ) 


10 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


worthy than even the shred husks and the shattered 
stalks. 

Folle-Farine, — she watched the dust fly in and out all 
day long from bet^ween the grindstones. She only won- 
dered why, if she and the dust were thus kindred and 
namesakes, the wind flew away with the dust so merci- 
fully, and yet never would fly away with her. 

The dust was carried away by the breeze, and wan- 
dered wherever it listed. The dust had a sweet, short, 
summer-day life of its own ere it died. If it were worth- 
less, it at least was free. It could lie in the curl of a 
green leaf, or on the white breast of a flower. It could 
mingle with the golden dust in a lily, and almost seem to 
be one with it. It could fly with the thistle-down, and 
with the feathers of the dandelion, on every roving 
wind that blew. 

In a vague dreamy fashion, the child wondered why 
the dust was so much better dealt with than she was. 

‘Folle-Farine! Folle — Folle — Folle — Farine!” the 
other children hooted after her, echoing the name by 
which the grim humor of her bitter-tongued taskmaster 
had called her. She had got used to it, and answered 
to it as others to their birthnames. 

It meant that she was a thing utterly useless, abso- 
lutely worthless ; the very refuse of the winnowings of 
the flail of fate. But she accepted that too, so far as 
she understood it; she only sometimes wondered in a 
dull fierce fashion why, if she and the dust were sisters, 
the dust had its wings while she had none. 

All day long the dust flew in and out and about as it 
liked, through the open doors, and among the tossing 
boughs, and through the fresh cool mists, and down the 
golden shafts of the sunbeams ; and all day long she 
stayed in one place and toiled, and was first beaten and 
then cursed, or first cursed and then beaten, — which was 
all the change that her life knew. For herself, she saw 
no likeness betwixt her and the dust ; for that escaped 
from the scourge and flew forth, but she abode undei> the 
flail, always. 

Nevertheless, Folle-Farine was all the name she knew. 

The great black wheel churned and circled in the 


FOLLE-FARINEi 


11 


brook water, and lichens and ferns and mosses made 
lovely all the dark, shadowy, silent place ; the red mill 
roof gleamed in the sun, under a million summer leaves; 
the pigeons came and went all day in and out of their 
holes in the wall ; the sweet scents of ripening fruits in 
many orchards filled the air ; the great grindstones turned 
and turned and turned, and the dust floated forth to dance 
with the gnat and to play with the sunbeam. 

Folle-Farine sat aloft, on the huge, black, wet timbers 
above the wheel, and watched with her thoughtful eyes, 
and wondered again, after her own fashion, why her 
namesake had thus liberty to fly forth whilst she had 
none. 

Suddenly a shrill, screaming voice broke the stillness 
savagely. 

“ Little devil I’^ cried the miller, “ go fetch me those 
sacks, and carry them within, and pile them ; neatly, do 
you hear ? Like the piles of stone in the road.” 

Folle-Farine swung down from the timbers in obedi- 
ence to the command, and went to the heap of sacks that 
lay outside the mill ; small sacks, most of them ; all of 
last year’s flour. 

There was an immense gladiolus growing near, in the 
mill-garden, where they were ; a tall flower all scarlet 
and gold, and straight as a palm, with bees sucking into 
its bells, and butterflies poising on its stem. She stood a 
moment looking at its beauty ; she was scarce any higher 
than its topmost bud, and was in her way beautiful, some- 
thing after its fashion. She was a child of six or eight 
years, with limbs moulded like sculpture, and brown as 
the brook water; great lustrous eyes, half savage and 
half soft; a mouth like a red pomegranate bud, and 
straight dark brows — the brows of the friezes of Egypt. 

Her only clothing was a short white linen kirtle, 
knotted around her waist, and falling to her knees ; and 
her skin was burned, by exposure in the sun, to a golden- 
brown color, though in texture it was soft as velvet, and 
showed all the veins like glass. Standing there in the deep 
grass, with the great scarlet flower against her, and pur- 
ple butterflies over her head, an artist would have painted 
her and called her by a score of names, and described for 


12 


FOLLE-FARINE, 


her some mystical or noble fate : as Anteros, perhaps, or 
as the doomed son of Procne, or as some child born to 
the Forsaken in the savage forests of Naxos, or conceived 
by Persephone, in the eternal night of hell, while still 
the earth lay black and barren and fruitless, under the 
ban and curse of a bereaved maternity. 

But here she had only one name, Folle-Farine ; and 
here she had only to labor drearily and stupidly like the 
cattle of the field ; without their strength, and with 
barely so much even as their scanty fare and begrudged 
bed. 

The sunbeams that fell on her might find out that she 
had a beauty which ripened and grew rich under their 
warmth, like that of a red flower bud or a golden autumn 
fruit. But nothing else ever did. In none of the eyes 
that looked on her had she any sort of loveliness. She 
was Folle-Farine ; a little wicked beast that only merited 
at best a whip and a cruel word, a broken crust and a 
malediction ; a thing born of the devil, and out of which 
the devil needed to be scourged incessantly. 

The sacks were all small ; they were the property 
of the peasant proprietors of the district, — a district of 
western Normandy. But though small they were heavy 
in proportion to her age and power. She lifted one, 
although with effort, yet with the familiarity of an accus- 
tomed action ; poised it on her back, clasped it tight 
with her round slender arms, and carried it slowly 
through the open door of the mill. That one put down 
upon the bricks, she came for a second, — a third, — a 
fourth, — a fifth, — a sixth, working doggedly, patiently 
and willingly, as a little donkey works. 

The sacks were in all sixteen ; before the seventh she 
paused. 

It was a hot day in mid-August : she was panting and 
burning with the exertion ; the bloom in her cheeks had 
deepened to scarlet; she stood a moment, resting, bath- 
ing her face in the sweet coolness of a white tall tuft of 
lilies. 

The miller looked round where he worked, among his 
beans and cabbages, and saw. 

“ Little mule I Little beast I” he cried. “ Would you 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


13 


be lazy — ^you ! — who have no more right to live at all 
than an eft, or a stoat, or a toad 

And as he spoke he came toward her. He had caught 
up a piece of rope with which he had been about to tie 
his tall beans to a stake, and he struck the child with it. 
The sharp cord bit the flesh cruelly, curling round her 
bare chest and shoulders, and leaving a livid mark. 

She quivered a little, but she said nothing; she lifted 
her head and looked at him, and dropped her hands to 
her sides. Her great eyes glowed fiercely ; her red 
curling lips shut tight ; her straight brows drew together. 

“ Little devil I Will you work now V said the miller. 
“ Do you think you are to stand in the sun and smell at 
flowers — you ? Pouf-f-f I” 

Folle-Farine did not move. 

“ Pick up the sacks this moment, little brute,” said the 
miller. “ If you stand still a second before they are all 
housed, you shall have as many stripes as there are sacks 
left untouched. Oh-he, do you hear 

She heard, but she did not move. 

“Do you hear?” he pursued. “As many strokes as 
there are sacks, little wretch. Now — I will give you 
three moments to choose. One !” 

Folle-Farine still stood mute and immovable, her head 
erect, her arms crossed on her chest. A small, slender, 
bronze-hued, half-nude figure among the ruby hues of the 
gladioli and the pure snowlike whiteness of the lilies. 

“ Two I” 

She stood in the same attitude, the sacks lying un- 
touched at her feet, a purple- winged butterfly lighting on 
her head. 

“ Three !” 

She was still mute ; still motionless. 

He seized her by the shoulder with one hand, and with 
the other lifted the rope. 

It curled round her breast and back, again and again and 
again ; she shuddered, but she did not utter a single cry. 
He struck her the ten times ; with the same number of 
strokes as there remained sacks uncarried. He did not 
exert any great strength, for had he used his uttermost 
he would have killed her, and she was of value to him j 

2 


14 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


but he scourged her with a merciless exactitude in the 
execution of his threat, and the rope was soon wet with 
drops of her bright young blood. 

The noonday sun fell golden all around ; the deep 
sweet peace of the silent country reigned everywhere; 
the pigeons fled to and fro in and out of their little arched 
homes; tire millstream flowed on, singing a pleasant 
song; now and then a ripe apricot dropped with a low 
sound on the turf; close about was all the radiance of 
summer flowers ; of heavy rich roses, of yellow lime 
tufts, of sheaves of old-fashioned comely phlox, and all 
the delicate shafts of the graceful lilies. And in the 
warmth the child shuddered under the scourge ; against 
the light the black rope curled like a serpent darting to 
sting; among the sun-fed blossoms there fell a crimson 
stain. 

But never a word had she uttered. She endured to 
the tenth stroke in silence. 

He flung the cord aside among the grass. “ Daughter 
of devils 1 — what strength the devil gives!’’ he mut- 
tered. 

Folle-Farine said nothing. Her face was livid, her 
back bruised and lacerated, her eyes still glanced with 
undaunted scorn and untamed passion. Still she said 
nothing ; but, as his hand released her, she darted as 
noiselessly as a lizard to the water’s edge, set her foot on 
the lowest range of the woodwork, and in a second leaped 
aloft to the highest point, and seated herself astride on 
that crossbar of black timber on which she had been 
throned when he had summoned her first, above the foam 
of the churning wheels, and in the deepest shadow of 
innumerable leaves. 

Then she lifted up a voice as pure, as strong, as fresh 
as the voice of a mavis in May-time, and sang, with reck- 
less indifference, a stave of song in a language unknown 
to any of the people of that place ; a loud fierce air, with 
broken words of curious and most dulcet melody, which 
rang loud and defiant, yet melancholy, even in their re- 
bellion, through the foliage, and above the sound of the 
loud mill water. 

“ It is a chant to the foul fiend,” the miller muttered 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


15 


to himself. “Well, why does he not come and take his 
own ? he would be welcome to it.” 

And he went and sprinkled holy water on his rope, 
and said an ave or two over it to exorcise it. 

Every fiber of her childish body ached and throbbed ; 
the stripes on her shoulders burned like flame ; her little 
brain was dizzy ; her little breast was black with bruises ; 
but still she sang on, clutching the timber with her hands 
to keep her from falling into the foam below, and flashing 
her fierce proud eyes down through the shade of the 
leaves. 

“ Can one never cut the devil out of her ?” muttered 
the miller, going back to his work among the beans. 

After awhile the song ceased ; the pain she suffered 
stifled her voice despite herself ; she felt giddy and sick, 
but she sat there still in the shadow, holding on by the 
jutting woodwork, and watching the water foam and 
eddy below. 

The hours went away ; the golden day died ; the 
grayness of evening stole the glow from the gladioli and 
shut up the buds of the roses ; the great lilies gleamed 
but the whiter in the dimness of twilight; the vesper 
chimes were rung from the cathedral two leagues away 
over the fields. 

The miller stopped the gear of the mill ; the grind- 
stones and the water-wheels were set at rest ; the peace 
of the night came down ; the pigeons flew to roost in 
their niches; but the sacks still lay uncarried on the 
grass, and a spider had found time to spin his fairy ropes 
about them. 

The miller stood on his threshold, and looked up at 
her where she sat aloft in the dusky shades of the leaves. 

“ Come down and carry these sacks, little brute,” he 
said. “ If not — no supper for you to-night.” 

Eolle-Farine obeyed him and came down from the 
huge black pile slowly, her hands crossed behind her 
back, her head erect, her eyes glancing like the eyes of 
a wild hawk. 

She walked straight past the sacks, across the dew- 
laden turf, through the tufts of the lilies, and so silently 
into the house. 


16 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


The entrance was a wide kitchen, paved with blue and 
white tiles, clean as a watercress, filled with the pun- 
gent odor of drie'd herbs, and furnished with brass pots 
and pans, with walnut presses, and with pinewood tres- 
tles, and with strange little quaint pictures and images of 
saints. On one of the trestles were set a jug of steam- 
ing milk, some rolls of black bread, and a big dish of 
stewed cabbages. At the meal there was already seated 
a lean, brown, wrinkled, careworn old serving-woman, 
clad in the blue-gray kirtle and the white head-gear of 
Normandy. 

The miller stayed the child at the threshold. 

“Little devil — not a bit nor drop to-night if you do 
not carry the sacks.” 

Folle-Farine said nothing, but moved on, past the food 
on the board, past the images of the saints, past the high 
lancet window, through which the moonlight had begun 
to stream, and out at the opposite door. 

There she climbed a steep winding stairway on to 
which that door had opened, pushed aside a little wooden 
Avicket, entered a loft in the roof, loosened the single gar- 
ment that she wore, shook it olf from her, and plunged 
into the fragrant mass of daisied hay and of dry orchard 
mosses which served her as a bed. Covered in these, 
and curled like a dormouse in its nest, she clasped her 
hands above her head and sought to forget in sleep her 
hunger and her wounds. She was well used to both. 

Below there was a crucifix, with a bleeding god upon 
it; there was a little rudely-sculptured representation of 
the Nativity; there was a wooden figure of St. Christo- 
pher ; a portrait of the Madonna, and many other sym- 
bols of the church. But the child went to her bed with- 
out a prayer cfn her lips, and with a curse on her head 
and bruises on her body. 

Sleep, for once, would not come to her. She was too 
hurt and sore to be able to lie without pain ; the dried 
grasses, so soft to her usually, were like thorns beneath 
the skin that still swelled and smarted from the stripes 
of the rope. She was feverish ; she tossed and turned 
in vain ; she suffered too much to be still ; she sat up 
and stared with her passionate wistful eyes at the leaves 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


n 


that were swaying against the square casement in the 
wall, and the moonbeam that shone so cold and bright 
across her bed. 

She listened, all her senses awake, to the noises of the 
house. They were not many: a cat’s mew, a mouse’s 
scratch, the click-clack of the old woman’s step, the 
shrill monotony of the old man’s voice, these were all. 
After awhile even these ceased ; the wooden shoes clat- 
tered up the wooden stairs, the house became quite 
still ; there was only in the silence the endless flowing 
murmur of the water breaking against the motionless 
wheels of the mill. 

Neither man nor woman had come near to bring her 
anything to eat or drink. She had heard them muttering 
their prqyers before they went to rest, but no hand un- 
latched her door. She had no disappointment, because 
she had had no hope. 

She had rebellion, because Nature had implanted it in 
her ; but she went no further. She did not know what 
it was to hope. She was only a young wild animal, 
well used to blows, and drilled by them, but not tamed. 

As soon as the place was silent, she got out of her 
nest of grass, slipped on her linen skirt, and opened her 
casement — a small square hole in the wall, and merely 
closed by a loose deal shutter, with a hole cut in it 
scarcely bigger than her head. A delicious sudden rush 
of summer air met her burning face *, a cool cluster of 
foliage hit her a soft blow across the eyes as the wind 
stirred it. They were enough to allure her. 

Like any other young cub of the woods, she had only 
two instincts — air and liberty. 

She thrust herself out of the narrow window with the 
agility that only is born of frequent custom, and got upon 
the shelving thatch of a shed that sloped a foot or so be- 
low, slid down the roof, and swung herself by the jutting 
bricks of the outhouse wall on to the grass. The house- 
dog, a brindled mastiff, that roamed loose all night about 
the mill, growled and sprang at her ; then, seeing who 
she was, put up his gaunt head and licked her face, and 
turned again to resume the rounds of his vigilant patrol. 

Ere he went, she caught and kissed him, closely and 
2 * 


18 


FOLLE-FARINE, 


fervently, without a word. The mastiff was the only 
living thing that did not hate her ; she was grateful, in a 
passionate, dumb, unconscious fashion. Then she took 
to her feet, ran as swiftly as she could along the margin 
of the water, and leaped like a squirrel into the wood, on 
whose edge the mill-house stood. 

Once there she was content. 

The silence, the shadows, the darkness where the trees 
stood thick, the pale quivering luminance of the moon, 
the mystical eerie sounds that fill a woodland by night, 
all which would have had terror for tamer and happier 
creatures of her years, had only for her a vague entranced 
delight. Nature had made her without one pulse of 
fear; and she had remained too ignorant to have been 
ever taught it. 

It was still warm with all the balmy breath of mid- 
summer ; there were heavy dews everywhere ; here and 
there, on the surface of the water, there gleamed the white 
closed cups of the lotos ; through the air there passed, 
now and then, the soft, gray, dim body of a night-bird 
on the wing ; the wood, whose trees were pines, and 
limes, and maples, was full of a deep dreamy odor ; the 
mosses that clothed many of the branches hung, film- 
like, in the wind in lovely coils and weblike fantasies. 

Around stretched the vast country, dark and silent as 
in a trance, the stillness only broken by some faint note 
of a sheep’s bell, some distant song of a mule-driver 
passing homeward. 

The child strayed onward through the trees, insensibly 
soothed and made glad, she knew not why, by all the 
dimness and the fragrance round her. 

She stood up to her knees in the shallow freshets that 
every now and then broke up through the grasses ; she 
felt the dews, shaken off the leaves above, fall deliciously 
upon her face and hair ; she filled her hands with the 
night-blooming marvel-flower, and drank in its sweetness 
as though it were milk and honey ; she crouched down 
and watched her own eyes look back at her from the dark 
gliding water of the river. 

Then ,ghe threw herself on her back upon the mosses — 
80 cool and moist that they seemed like balm upon the 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


19 


bruised hot skin — and lay there looking upward at the 
swift mute passage of the flitting owls, at the stately 
flight of the broad-winged moths, at the movement of 
the swift brown bats, at the soft trembling of the fo- 
liage in the breeze, at the great clouds slowly sailing 
across the brightness of the moon. All these things 
were vaguely sweet to her — with the sweetness of 
freedom, of love, of idleness, of rest, of all things 
which her life had never known : so may the young 
large-eyed antelope feel the beauty of the forest in the 
hot lull of tropic nights, when the speed of the pursuer 
has relaxed and the aromatic breath of the panther is no 
more against its flank. 

She lay there long, quite motionless, tracing with a 
sort of voluptuous delight, all movements in the air, all 
changes in the clouds, all shadows in toe leaves. All 
the immense multitude of ephemeral liie which, unheard 
in the day, fills the earth with innumerable whispering 
voices after the sun has set, now stirred in every herb 
and under every bough around her. The silvery ghost- 
like wing of an owl touched her forehead once. A little 
dormouse ran across her feet. Strange shapes floated 
across the cold white surface of the water. Quaint 
things, hairy, film-winged, swam between her and the 
stars. But none of these things had terror for her ; they 
were things of the night, with which she felt vaguely the 
instinct of kinship. 

She was only a little wild beast, they said, the off- 
spring of darkness, and vileness, and rage and disgrace. 
And yet, in a vague, imperfect way, the glories of the 
night, its mysterious and solemn beauty, its melancholy 
and lustrous charm, quenched the fierceness in her daunt- 
less eyes, and filled them with dim wondering tears, and 
stirred the half-dead soul in her to some dull pain, some 
nameless ecstasy, that were not merely physical. 

And then, in her way, being -stung by these, and 
moved, she knew not why, to a strange sad sense of lone- 
liness and shame, and knowing no better she prayed. 

She raised herself on her knees, and crossed her hands 
upon her chest, and prayed after the fashion that she 
had seen men and women and children pray at roadside 


20 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


shrines and crosses ; prayed aloud, with a little beating, 
breaking heart, like the young child she was. 

“ 0 Devil 1 if I be indeed thy daughter, stay with 
me ; leave me not alone : lend me thy strength and 
power, and let me inherit of thy kingdom. Give me 
this, O great lord! and I will praise thee and love thee 
always.” 

She prayed in all earnestness, in all simplicity, in 
broken, faltering language ; knowing no better ; knowing 
only that she was alone on the earth and friendless, and 
very hungry and in sore pain, while this mighty un- 
known King of the dominion of darkness, whose child 
she ever heard she was, had lost her or abandoned her, 
and reigned afar in some great world, oblivious of her 
misery. 

The silence of the night alone gave back the echo of 
her own voice. She waited breathless for some answer, 
for some revelation, some reply; there only came the 
pure cold moon, sailing straight from out a cloud and 
striking on the waters. 

She rose sadly to her feet and went back along the 
shining course of the stream, through the grasses and 
the mosses and under the boughs, to her little nest 
under the eaves. 

As she left the obscurity of the wood and passed into 
the fuller light, her bare feet glistening and her shoul- 
ders wet with the showers of dew, a large dark shape 
flying down the wind smote her with his wings upon the 
eyes, lighted one moment on her head, and then swept 
onward lost in shade. At that moment, likewise, a ra- 
diant golden globe flashed to her sight, dropped to her 
footsteps, and shone an instant in the glisten from the 
skies. 

It was but a great goshawk seeking for its prey ; it 
was but a great meteor fading and falling at its due ap- 
pointed hour ; but to the heated, savage, dreamy fancy 
of the child it seemed an omen, an answer, a thing of 
prophecy, a spirit of air ; nay, why not Him himself ? 

In legends, which had been the only lore her ears had 
ever heard, it had been often told her that he took such 
shapes as this. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


21 


If he should give me his kingdom she thought ; 
and her eyes flashed alight ; her heart swelled ; her 
cheeks burned. The little dim untutored brain could 
not hold the thought long or close enough to grasp, or 
sift, or measure it ; but some rude rich glory, impalpable, 
unutterable, seemed to come to her and bathe her in its 
heat and color. She was his offspring, so they all told 
her ; why not, then, also his heir ? 

She felt, as felt the goatherd or the charcoal-burner in 
those legends she had fed on, who was suddenly called 
from poverty and toil, from hunger and fatigue, from a 
fireless hearth and a bed of leaves, to inherit some fairy 
empire, to ascend to some region of the gods. Like one 
of these, hearing the summons to some great unknown 
imperial power smite all his poor pale barren life to 
splendor, so Folle-Farine, standing by the water’s side 
in the light of the moon, desolate, ignorant, brutelike, 
felt elected to some mighty heritage unseen of men. 
If this were waiting for her in the future, what matter 
now were stripes or wounds or woe ? 

She smiled a little, dreamily, like one who beholds fair 
visions in his sleep, and stole back over the starlit grass, 
and swung herself upward by the tendrils of ivy, and 
crouched once more down in her nest of mosses. 

And either the courage of the spirits of darkness, or 
the influence of instincts dumb but nascent, was with her, 
for she fell asleep in her little loft in the roof as though 
she were a thing cherished of heaven and earth, and 
dreamed happily all through the hours of the slowly- 
rising dawn : her bruised body and her languid brain and 
her aching heart all stilled and soothed, and her hunger 
and passion and pain forgotten ; with the night-blooming 
flowers still clasped in her hands, and on her closed mouth 
a smile. 

For she dreamed of her Father’s Kingdom, a kingdom 
which no man denies to the creature that has beaut}^ and 
youth, and is poor and yet proud, and is of the sex of its 
mother. 


22 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


CHAPTER IL 

In one of the most fertile and most fair districts of 
northern France there was a little Norman town, very 
very old, and beautiful exceedingly by reason of its an- 
cient streets, its high peaked roofs, its marvelous galleries 
and carvings, its exquisite grays and browns, its silence 
and its color, and its rich still life. Its center was a great 
cathedral, noble as York or Chartres ; a cathedral, whose 
spire shot to the clouds, and whose innumerable towers 
and pinnacles were all pierced to the day, so that the 
blue sky shone and the birds of the air flew all through 
them. A slow brown river, broad enough for market- 
boats and for corn-barges, stole through the place to the 
sea, lapping as it went the wooden piles of the houses, 
and reflecting the quaint shapes of the carvings, the hues 
of the signs and the draperies, the dark spaces of the 
dormer windows, the bright heads of some casement- 
cluster of carnations, the laughing face of a girl leaning 
out to smile on her lover. 

All around it lay the deep grass unshaven, the leagues 
on leagues of fruitful orchards, the low blue hills ten- 
derly interlacing one another, the fields of colza, where 
the white head-dress of the women workers flashed in 
the sun like a silvery pigeon’s wing. To the west were 
the deep-green woods and the wide plains golden with 
gorse of Arthur’s and of Merlin’s lands ; and beyond, to 
the northward, was the great dim stretch of the ocean 
breaking on a yellow shore, whither the river ran, and 
whither led straight shady roads, hidden with linden and 
with poplar-trees, and marked ever and anon by a way- 
side wooden Christ, or by a little murmuring well crowned 
with a crucifix. 

A beautiful, old, shadowy, ancient place: picturesque 
everywhere ; often silent, with a sweet sad silence 
that was chiefly broken by the sound of bells or the 
chanting of choristers. A place of the Middle Ages 
still. With lanterns swinging on cords from house to 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


23 


house as the only light ; with wondrous scroll-works and 
quaint signs at the doors of all its traders ; with monks’ 
cowls and golden croziers and white-robed acolytes in its 
streets ; with the subtle smoke of incense coming out 
from the cathedral door to mingle with the odors of the 
fruits and flowers in the market-place ; with great flat- 
bottomed boats drifting down the river under the leaning 
eaves of its dwellings ; and with the galleries of its op- 
posing houses touching so nearly that a girl leaning in 
one could stretch a Provence rose or toss an Easter-egg 
across to her neighbor in the other. 

Doubtless there were often squalor, poverty, dust,^filth, 
and uncomeliness within these old and beautiful homes. 
Doubtless often the dwellers therein -were housed like 
cattle and slept like pigs, and looked but once out to the 
woods and waters of the landscapes round for one hun- 
dred times that they looked at their hidden silver in an 
old delf jug, or at their tawdry colored prints of St. 
Victorian or St. Scaevola. 

But yet much of the beauty and the nobility of the old, 
simple, restful rich-hued life of the past still abode there, 
and remained with them. In the straight lithe form of 
their maidens, untrammeled by modern garb, and moving 
with the free majestic grace of forest does. In the vast, 
dim, sculptured chambers, where the grandam span by 
the wood fire and the little children played in the shadows, 
and the lovers whispered in the embrasured window. 
In the broad market-place, whwere the mules cropped the 
clover, and the tawny awnings caught the sunlight, and 
the white caps of the girls framed faces fitted for the 
pencils of missal painters, and the wondrous flush of 
color from mellow fruits and flowers glanced amidst the 
shelter of deepest, freshest green. In the perpetual pres- 
ence of their cathedral, which through sun and storm, 
through frost and summer, through noon and midnight, 
stood there amidst them, and beheld the galled oxen tread 
their painful way, and the scourged mules droop their 
humble heads, and the helpless harmless flocks go forth 
to the slaughter, and the old weary lives of the men and 
women pass through hunger and cold to the grave, and 
the sun and the moon rise and set, and the flowers and 


24 


FOLLE-FARINE, 


the children blossom and fade, and the endless years 
come and go, bringing peace, bringing war; bringing 
harvest, bringing famine ; bringing life, bringing death ; 
and, beholding these, still said to the multitude in its 
terrible irony, “ Lo ! your God is Love.” 

This little town lay far from the great Paris highway 
and all greatly frequented tracks. It was but a short dis- 
tance from the coast, but near no harbor of greater extent 
than such as some small fishing village had made in the 
rocks for the trawlers. Few strangers ever came to it, 
except some wandering painters or antiquaries. It sent 
its apples and eggs, its poultry and honey, its colza and 
corn, to the use of the great cities ; but it was rarely that 
any of its own people went thither. 

Now and then some one of the oval-faced, blue-eyed, 
lithe-limbed maidens of its little homely households 
would sigh and flush and grow restless, and murmur 
of Paris ; and would steal out in the break of a warm 
gray morning whilst only the bii’ds were still waking ; 
and would patter away in her wooden shoes over the 
broad, white, southern road, with a stick over her shoul- 
der, and a bundle of all her worldly goods upon the stick. 
And she would look back often, often as she went; and 
when all was lost in the blue haze of distance save the 
lofty spire that she still saw through her tears, she would 
say in her heart, with her lips parched and trembling, 
“ 1 will come back again. I will come back again.” 

But none such ever did come back. 

They came back no more than did the white sweet 
^heaves of the lilies that the women gathered and sent 
to be bought and sold in the city — to gleam one faint 
summer night in a gilded balcony, and to be flung out 
the next morning, withered and dead. 

One among the few who had thus gone whither the 
lilies went, and of whom the people would still talk as 
their mules paced homewards through the lanes at twi- 
light, had been Heine Flamma, the daughter of the miller 
of Yprhs. 

Ypres was a beechen-wooded hamlet on the northern 
outskirt of the town, a place of orchards and wooded 
tangle ; through which there ran a branch of the brim- 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


25 


ming river, hastening to seek and join the sea, and caught 
a moment on its impetuous way, and forced to work by 
the grim mill-wheels that had churned the . foam-bells 
there for centuries. The mill-house was very ancient ; 
its timbers were carved all over into the semblance of 
shields and helmets, and crosses, and fleur-de-lis, and its 
frontage was of quaint pargeted work, black and white, 
except where the old blazonries had been. 

It had been handed down from sire to son of the same 
race through many generations — a race hard, keen, un- 
learned, superstitious, and caustic-tongued — a race wedded 
to old ways, credulous of legend, chaste of life, cruel of 
judgment; harshly strong, yet ignorantly weak; a race 
holding dearer its heir-loom of loveless, joyless, bigoted 
virtue even than those gold and silver pieces which had 
ever been its passion, hidden away in earthen pipkins 
under old apple-roots, or in the crannies of wall timber, 
or in secret nooks of oaken cupboards. 

Claudis Flamma, the last of this toilsome, God-fearing, 
man-begrudging, Norman stock, was true to the type and 
the traditions of his people. 

He was too ignorant even to read ; but priests do not 
deem this a fault. He was avaricious; but many will 
honor a miser quicker than a spendthrift. He was cruel; 
but in the market-place he always took heed to give his 
mare a full feed, so that if she were pinched of her hay 
in her stall at home none were the wiser, for she had no 
language but that of her wistful black eyes ; and this is 
a speech to which men stay but little to listen. The 
shrewd, old bitter-tongued, stern-living man was feared 
and respected with the respect that fear begets ; and in 
truth he had a rigid virtue in his way, and was proud of 
it, with scorn for those who found it hard to walk less 
straightly and less circumspectly than himself. 

He married late ; his wife died in childbirth ; his 
daughter grew into the perfection of womanhood under 
the cold, hard, narrow rule of his severity and his super- 
stition. He loved her, indeed, with as much love as it 
was possible for him ever to feel, and was proud of her 
beyond all other things ; saved for her, toiled for her, 
muttered ever that it was for her when at confession 

3 


26 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


he related how his measures of flour had been falsely 
weighted, and how he had filched from the corn brought 
by the widow and the fatherless. For her he had sinned : 
from one to whom the good report of his neighbors and 
the respect of his own conscience were as the very 
breath of life, it was the strongest proof of love that he 
could give. But this love never gleamed one instant in 
his small sharp gray eyes, nor escaped ever by a single 
utterance from his lips. Reprimand, or homily, or cynical 
rasping sarcasm, was all that she ever heard from him. 
She believed that he despised, and almost hated her; he 
held it well for women to be tutored in subjection and in 
trembling. 

At twenty-two Heine Flamma was the most beautiful 
woman in Calvados, and the most wretched. 

She was straight as a pine ; cold as snow ; graceful as 
a stem of wheat : lovely and silent ; with a mute proud 
face, in which the great blue eyes alone glowed with a 
strange, repressed, speechless passion and wishfulness. 
Her life was simple, pure, chaste, blameless, as tlje lives 
of the many women of her race who, before her, had 
lived and died in the shadow of that water-fed wood had 
always been. Her father rebuked and girded at her, 
continually dreaming that he could paint whiter even the 
spotlessuess of this lily, refine even the purity of this 
virgin gold. 

She never answered him anything, nor in anything 
contradicted his will ; not one among all the youths and 
maidens of her birthplace had ever heard so much as a 
murmur of rebellion from her; and the priests said that 
such a life as this would be fitter for the cloister than the 
marriage-bed. None of them ever read the warning that 
these dark-blue slumbering eyes would have given to any 
who should have had the skill to construe them right. 
There were none of such skill there ; and so, she holding 
her peace, the men and women noted her ever with a 
curious dumb reverence, and said among themselves that 
the race of Flamma would die well and nobly in her. 

“A saint 1” said the good old gentle bishop of the dis- 
trict, as he blessed her one summer evening in her father’s 
house, and rode his mule slowly through the pleasant pop- 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


27 


lar lanes and breeze-blown fields of colza back to his little 
quiet homestead, where he tended his own cabbages and 
garnered his own honey. 

Reiue Flamma bowed her tall head meekly, and took 
his benediction in silence. 

The morning after, the miller, rising, as his custom was, 
at daybreak, and reciting his paternosters, thanked the 
Mother of the World that she had given him thus strength 
and power to rear up his motherless daughter in purity 
and peace. Then he dressed himself in his gray patched 
blouse, groped his way down the narrow stair, and went 
in his daily habit to undraw the bolts and unloose the 
chains of his dwelling. 

There was no need that morning for him ; the bolts 
were already back ; the house-door stood wide open : on 
the threshold a brown hen perched pluming herself ; there 
were the ticking of the clock, the chinning of the birds, 
the rushing of the water, these were the only sounds 
upon the silence. 

He called his daughter’s name : there was no answer. 
He mounted to her chamber; it had no tenant. He 
searched hither and thither, in the house, and the stable, 
and the granary: in the mill, and the garden, and the 
wood ; he shouted, he ran, he roused his neighbors, he 
looked in every likely and unlikely place ; there was no 
reply. 

There was only the howl of the watch-dog, who sat 
with his face to the soutj;i and mourned unceasingly. 

And from that day neither he nor any man living there 
ever heard again of Reine Flamma. 

Some indeed did notice that at the same time there 
disappeared from the town one who had been there 
through all that spring and summer. One who had 
lived strangely, and been clad in an odd rich fashion, 
and had been whispered as an Eastern prince by reason 
of his scattered gold, his unfamiliar tongue, his black- 
browed, star-eyed, deep-bued beauty, like the beauty of 
the passion-flower. But none had ever seen this stranger 
and Reiue Flamma in each other’s presence; and the 
rumor was discredited as a foulness absurd and unseemly 
to be said of a woman whom their bishop had called a 


28 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


saint. So it died out, breathed only by a few mouths, 
and it came to be accepted as a fact that she must have 
perished in the deep fast-flowing river by some false step 
oil the mill-timber, as she went at dawn to feed her doves, 
or by some strange sad trance of sleep-walking, from 
which she had been known more than once to sufler. 

Claudis Flamma said little ; it was a wound that bled 
inwardly. He toiled, and chaffered, and drove hard bar- 
gains, and worked early and late with his hireling, and 
took for the household service an old Norman peasant 
woman more aged than himself, and told no man that he 
suffered. All that he ever said was, “ She was a saint : 
God took her;” and in his martyrdom he found a hard 
pride and a dull consolation. 

It was no mere metaphoric form of words with him. 
He believed in miracles and all manner of divine inter- 
position, and he believed likewise that she, his angel, 
being too pure for earth, had been taken by God’s own 
hand up to the bosom of Mary ; and this honor which had 
befallen his first-begotten shed a sanctity and splendor 
on his cheerless days ; and when the little children and 
the women saw him })ass,- they cleared from his way as 
from a prince’s, and crossed themselves as they changed 
worifs with one whose daughter was the bride of Christ. 

So six years passed away ; and the name of Heine 
Flamma was almost forgotten, but embalmed in memo- 
ries of religious sanctity, as the dead heart of a saint is 
imbedded in amber and myrrh. ^ 

At the close of the sixth year there happened what 
many said was a thing devil-conceived and wrought out 
by the devil to the shame of a pure name, and to the 
hinderance of the people of God. 

One winter’s night Claudis Flamma was seated in his 
kitchen, having recently ridden home his mare from the 
market in the town. The fire burned in ancient fashion 
on tlie hearth, and it was so bitter without that even his 
parsimonious habits had relaxed, and he had piled some 
wood, liberally mingled with dry moss, that cracked, and 
glowed, and shot flame up the wide black shaft of the 
chimney. The day’s work was over; the old woman- 
servant sat spinning flax on the other side of the fire; 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


29 


the great mastiff was stretched sleeping quietly on the 
brick floor; the blue pottery, the brass pans, the oaken 
presses that had been the riches of his race for genera- 
tions, glimmered in the light ; the doors were barred, the 
shutters closed ; around the house the winds howled, and 
beneath its walls the fretting water hissed. 

The miller, overcome with the past cold and present 
warmth, nodded in his wooden settle and slept, and mut- 
tered dreamily in his sleep, “A saint — a saint 1 — God 
took her.” 

The old woman, hearing, looked across at him, and shook 
her head, and went on with her spinning with lips that 
moved inaudibly : she had been wont to say, out of her 
taskmaster’s hearing, that no woman who was beautiful 
ever was a saint as well. And some thought that this old 
creature, Marie Pitchou, who used to live in a miserable 
hut on the other side of the wood, had known more 
than she had chosen to tell of the true fate of Reine 
Flamma. 

Suddenly a blow on the panels of the door sounded 
through the silence. The miller, awakened in a moment, 
started to his feet and grasped his ash staff with one hand, 
and with the other the oil-lamp burning on the trestle. 
The watch dog arose, but made no hostile sound. 

A step crushed the dead leaves without and passed 
away faintly; there was stillness again; the mastiff went 
to the bolted door, smelt beneath it, and scratched at the 
panels. » 

On the silence there sounded a small, timid, feeble beat- 
ing on the wood from without ; such a slight fluttering 
noise as a wounded bird might make in striving to rise. 

“ It is nothing evil,” muttered Flamma. “ If it were 
evil the beast would not want to have the door opened. 
It may be some one sick or stray.” 

All this time he was in a manner charitable, often con- 
quering the niggardly instincts of his character to try 
and save his soul by serving the wretched. He was a 
miser, and he loved to gain, and loathed to give ; but 
since bis daughter had been taken to the saints he had 
striven with all his might to do good enough to be taken 
likewise to that heavenly rest. 

3 * 


30 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


Any crust bestowed on the starveling, nny bed of straw 
afforded to the tramp, caused him a sharp pang ; but 
since his daughter had been taken he had tried to please 
God by this mortification of his own avarice and diminu- 
tion of his own^ gains. He could not vanquish the na- 
ture that was ingrained in him. He would rob the widow 
of an ephah of wheat, and leave his mare famished in her 
stall, because it was his nature to find in all such saving 
a sweet savor ; but he would not turn away a beggar or 
refuse a crust to a wayfarer, lest, thus refusing, be might 
turn away from him an angel unawares. 

The mastiff scratched still at the panels; the sound 
outside had ceased. 

The miller, setting the lamp down on the floor, gripped 
more firmly the ashen stick, undrew the bolts, turned the 
stout key, and opened the door slowly, and with caution. 
A loud gust of wind blew dead leaves against his face ; 
a blinding spray of snow scattered itself over his bent 
stretching form. In the darkness without, whitened from 
head to foot, there stood a little child. 

The dog went up to her and licked her face with kindly 
welcome. Claudis Flamma drew her with a rough grasp 
across the threshold, and went out into the air to find 
whose footsteps had been those which had trodden heav- 
ily away after the first knock. The snow, however, was 
falling fast; it was a cloudy moonless night. He did 
not dare to go many yards from his own portals, lest he 
should fall into some ambush set by robbers. The mas- 
tiff too was quiet, which indicated that there was no dan- 
ger near, so the old man returned, closed the door care- 
fully, drew the bolts into their places, and came towards 
the child, whom the woman Pitchou had drawn towards 
the fire. 

She was a child of four or five years oki; huddled 
in coarse linen and in a little red gaVment of fox’s skin, 
and blanched from head to foot, for the flakes were frozen 
on her and on the little hood that covered, gypsy-like, her 
curls. It was a strange, little, ice-cold, ghostlike figure, 
but out of this mass of icicles and whiteness there glowed 
great beaming frightened eyes and a mouth like a scarlet 
berry ; the radiance and the contrast of it were like the 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


31 


glow of holly fruit thrust out from a pile of drifted 
snow. 

The miller shook her by the shoulder. 

“ Who brought you 

“ Phratos,” answered the child, with a stifled sob in 
her throat. 

“And who is that 

“ Phratos,’’ answered the child again. 

“ Is that a man or a woman 

The child made no reply; she seemed not to compre- 
hend his meaning. The miller shook her again, and some 
drops of water fell from the ice that was dissolving in 
the warmth. 

“ Why are you come here V' he asked, impatiently. 

She shook her head, as though to say none knew so 
little of herself as she. 

“You must have a name,” he pursued harshly and in 
perplexity. “ What are you called ? Who £fre you 

The child suddenly raised her great eyes that had been 
fastened on the leaping flames, and flashed them upon his 
in a terror of bewildered ignorance — the piteous terror 
of a stray dog. 

“ Phratos,” she cried once more, and the cry now was 
half a sigh, half a shriek. 

Something in that regard pierced him and startled 
him ; he dropped his hand ofi' her shoulder, and breathed 
quickly; the old woman gave a low cry, and staring 
with all her might at the child’s small, dark, fierce, lovely 
face, fell to counting her wooden beads and mumbling 
many prayers. 

Claudis Flamma turned savagely on her as if stung by 
some unseen snake, and willing to wreak his vengeance 
on the nearest thing that was at hand. 

“ Fool ! cease your prating I” he muttered, with a brutal 
oath. “ Take the animal and search her. Bring me 
what you find.” 

Then he sat down on the stool by the fire, and braced 
his lips tightly, and locked his bony hands upon his 
knees. He knew what blow awaited him; he was no 
coward, and he had manhood enough in him to press any 
iron into his soul and tell none that it hurt him. 


82 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


The old woman drew the child aside to a dusky corner 
of the chamber, and began to despoil her of her cover- 
ings. The creature did not resist ; the freezing cold and 
long fatigue had numbed and silenced her; her eyelids 
were heavy with the sleep such cold produces, and she 
had not strength, because she had not consciousness 
enough, to oppose whatsoever they might choose to do 
to her. Only now and then her eyes opened, as they 
had opened on him, with a sudden luster and fierceness, 
like those in a netted animal’s impatient but untamed 
regard. 

Pitchou seized and searched her eagerly, stripping her 
of her warm fox-skin wrap, her scarlet hood of wool, her 
little rough hempen shirt, which were all dripping with 
the water from the melted snow. 

The skin of the child was brown, with a golden bloom 
on it ; it had been tanned by hot suns, but it was soft as 
silk in texture, and transparent, showing the couj’se of 
each blue vein. Her limbs were not well nourished, but 
they were of perfect shape and delicate bone; and the 
feet were the long, arched, slender feet of the southern 
side of the Pyrenees. 

She allowed herself to be stripped and wrapped in a 
coarse piece of homespun linen ; she was still half frozen, 
and in a state of stupor, either from amazement or from 
fear. She was quite passive, and she never spoke. Her 
apathy deceived the old crone, who took it for docility, 
and who, trusting to it, proceeded to take advantage of 
it, after the manner of her kind. About the child's head 
there hung a little band of glittering coins ; they were 
not gold, but the woman Pitchou thought they were, and 
seized them with gloating hands and ravenous eyes. 

The child started from her torpor, shook herself free, 
and fought to guard them — fiercely, with tooth and nail, 
as the young fox whose skin she had worn might have 
fought for its dear life. The old woman on her side 
strove as resolutely ; long curls of the child’s hair were 
clutched out in the struggle ; she did not wince or scream, 
but she fought — fought with all the breath and the blood 
that were in her tiny body. 

She was no match, with all her ferocity and fury, for 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


33 


the sinewy grip of the old peasant ; and the coins were 
torn off her forehead and hidden away in a hole in the 
wood, out of her sight, where the old peasant hoarded 
all her precious treasures of copper coins and other trifles 
that she managed to secrete from her master’s all-seeing 
eyes. 

They were little Oriental sequins engraved with Arabic 
characters, chained together after the Eastern fashion. 
To Pitchou they looked a diadem of gold worthy of an 
empress. The child watched them removed in perfect 
silence ; from the moment they had been wrenched away, 
and the battle had been finally lost to her, she had ceased 
to struggle, as though disdainful of a fruitless contest. 
But a great hate gathered in her eyes, and smouldered 
there like a half-stifled fire — it burned on and on for many 
a long year afterwards, unqueiiched. 

When Pitchou brought her a cup of water, and a roll 
of bread, she would neither eat nor drink, but turned her 
face to the wall, — mute. 

Those are just her father’s eyes,” the old woman 
muttered. She had seen them burn in the gloom of the 
evening through the orchard trees, as the stars rose, 
and as Heine Plamma listened to the voice that wooed 
her to her destruction. 

Shb let the child be, and searched her soaked garments 
for any written word or any token that might be on them. 
Fastened roughly to the fox’s skin there was a faded 
letter. Pitchou could not read ; she took it to her 
master. 

Claudis Flamma grasped the paper and turned its 
superscription to the light of the lamp. 

He likewise could not read, yet at sight of the char- 
acters his tough frame trembled, and his withered 
skin grew red with a sickly, feverish quickening of the 
blood. He knew them. Once, in a time long dead, he 
had been proud of those slender letters that had* been so 
far more legible than any that the women of her class 
could pen, and on beholding which the good bishop had 
smiled, and passed a pleasant word concerning her being 
almost fitted to be his own clerk and scribe. For a mo- 
ment, watching those written ciphers that had no tongue 


34 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


for him, and yet seemed to tell their tale so that they 
scorched and withered up all the fair honor and pious 
peace of his old age, a sudden faintness, a sudden swoon- 
ing sense seized him for the first time in all his life ; his 
limbs failed him, he sank down on his seat again, he gasped 
for breath ; he needed not to be told anything, he knew 
all. He knew that the creature, whom he had believed 
so pure that God had deemed the earth unworthy of her 
youth, was 

His throat rattled, his lips were covered with foam, 
his ears were filled with a rushing hollow sound, like the 
roaring of his own mill-waters in a time of storm. All 
at once he started to his feet, and glared at the empty 
space of the dim chamber, and struck his hands wildly 
together in the air, and cried aloud : 

“ She was a saint, I said — a saint I A saint in body 
and soul 1 And I thought that God begrudged her, and 
held her too pure for man !” 

And he laughed aloud — thrice. 

The child hearing, and heavy with sleep, and eagerly 
desiring warmth, as a little frozen beast that coils itself 
in snow to slumber into death, startled by that horrible 
mirth, came forward. 

The serge fell off her as she moved. Her little naked 
limbs glimmered like gold in the dusky light ; her hair 
was as a cloud behind her ; her little scarlet mouth was 
half open, like the mouth of a child seeking its mother’s 
kiss ; her great eyes, dazzled by the flame, flashed and 
burned and shone like stars. They had seen the same 
face ere then in Calvados. 

She came straight to Claudis Flamma as though drawn 
by that awful and discordant laughter, and by that leap- 
ing ruddy flame upon the hearth, and she stretched out 
her arms and murmured a word and smiled, a little 
dreamily, seeking to sleep, asking to be caressed, desiring 
she knew not what. 

He clinched his fist, and struck her to' the ground. 
She fell without a sound. The blood flowed from her 
mouth. 

He looked at her where she lay, and laughed once 
more. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


35 


“ She was a saint ! — a saint I And the devil beffot in 
her that 

Then he went out across the threshold and into the 
night, with the letter still clinched in his hand. 

The snow fell, the storm raged, the earth was covered 
with ice and water ; he took no heed, but passed through 
it, his head bare and his eyes blind. 

The dog Jet him go forth alone, and waited by the 
child. 


CHAPTER III. 

All night long he was absent. 

The old serving-woman, terrified, in so far as her dull 
brutish nature could be roused to fear, did what she 
knew, what she dared. She raised the little wounded 
naked creature, and carried her to her own pallet bed ; 
restored her to consciousness by such rude means as she 
had knowledge of, and stanched the flow of blood. She 
did all this harshly, as it was her custom to do all things, 
and without tenderness or even pity, for the sight of this 
stranger was unwelcome to her, and she also had guessed 
the message of that unread letter. 

The child had been stunned by the blow, and she had 
lost some blood, and was weakened and stupefied and 
dazed ; yet there seemed to her rough nurse no peril for 
her life, and by degrees she fell into a feverish, tossing 
slumber, sobbing sometimes in her sleep, and crying 
perpetually bn the unknown name of Phratos. 

The old woman Pitchou stood and looked at her. She 
who had always known the true story of that disappear- 
ance which some had called death and some had deemed 
a divine interposition, had seen before that transparent 
brown skin, those hues in cheeks and lips like the carna- 
tion leaves, that rich, sunfed, dusky beauty, those straight 
dark brows. 

“ She is his sure enough,” she muttered. “ He was 


36 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


tlie 6rst with Reine Flamma. I wonder has he been the 
last.” 

And she went down the stairs chuckling, as the low 
human brute will at any evil thought. 

The mastiff stayed beside the child. 

She went to the fire and threw more wood on, and sat 
down again to her spinning-wheel, and span and dozed, 
and span and dozed again. 

She was not curious; to her, possessing that thread to 
the secret of the past which her master and her town- 
folk had never held, it all seemed natural. It was an 
old, old story; there had been thousands like it; it 
was only strange because Reine Flamma had been held 
a saint. 

The hours passed on; the lamp paled, and its flame at 
last died out; in the loft above, where the dog watched, 
there was no sound ; the old woman slumbered undis- 
turbed, unless some falling ember of the wood aroused 
her. 

She was not curious, nor did she care how the child 
fared. She had led that deadening life of perpetual la- 
bor and of perpetual want in which the human animal be- 
comes either a machine or a devil. She was a machine ; 
put to what use she might be — to spin flax, to card wool, 
to wring a pigeon’s throat, to bleed a calf to death, to 
bake or stew, to mumble a prayer, or drown a kitten, it 
was all one to her. If she had a preference, it might be 
for the office that hurt some living thing ; but she did not 
care : all she heeded was whether she had pottage enough 
to eat at noonday, and the leaden effigy of her Mary safe 
around her throat at night. 

The night went on, and passed away ; one gleam of 
dawn shone through a round hole in the shutter; she 
wakened with a start to find the sun arisen, and the fire 
dead upon the hearth. 

She shook herself and stamped her chill feet upon the 
bricks, and tottered on her feeble way, with frozen body, 
to the house-door. She drew it slowly open, and saw by 
the light of the sun that it had been for some time morning. 

The earth was everywhere thick with snow; a hoar 
frost sparkled over all the branches ; great sheets of ice 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


37 


were whirled down the rapid mill-stream ; in one of the 
leafless boughs a robin sang, and beneath the bough a 
cat was crouched, waiting with hungry eager eyes, pa- 
tient even in its famished impatience. 

Dull as her sympathy was, and slow her mind, she 
started as she saw her master there. 

Claudis Flamma was at work; the rough, hard, rude 
toil, which he spared to himself no more than to those 
who were his hirelings. He was carting wood ; going 
to and fro with huge limbs of trees that men in youth 
would have found it a severe task to move ; he was labor- 
ing breathlessly, giving himself no pause, and the sweat 
was on his brow, although he trod ankle deep in snow, 
and although his clothes were heavy with icicles. 

He did not see or hear her; she went up to him and 
called him by his name ; he started, and raised his head 
and looked at her. 

Dull though she was, she was in a manner frightened 
by the change upon his face; it had been lean, fu!TOW(‘d, 
weather-beaten always, but it was livid now, with blood- 
shot eyes, and a bruised, broken, yet withal savage look 
that terrified her. He did not speak, but gazed at her 
like a man recalled from some drugged sleep back to the 
deeds and memories of the living world. 

The old woman held her peace a few monaents ; then 
spoke out in her old blunt, dogged fashion, — 

“ Is she to stay 

Her mind was not awake enough for any curiosity ; she 
only cared to know if the child stayed ; only so much as 
would concern her soup-kettle, her kneaded dough, her 
spun hemp, her household labor. 

He turned for a second with the gesture that a trapped 
fox may make, held fast, yet striving to essay a death- 
grip ; then he checked himself, and gave a mute sign of 
assent, and heaved up a fresh log of wood, and went on 
with his labors, silently. She knew of old his ways too 
well to venture to ask more. She ^new, too, that when 
he worked like this, fasting and in silence, there had been 
long and fierce warfare in his soul, and some great evil 
done for which he sought to make atonement. 

So she left him, and passed in to the house, and built 

4 


38 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


up afresh her fire, and swept her chamber out, and fast- 
ened up her round black pot to boil, and muttered all the 
while, — 

“ Another mouth to feed ; another beast to tend.” 

And the thing was bitter to her ; because it gave trouble 
and took food. 

Now, what the letter had been, or who had deciphered 
it for him, Claudis Flamma never told to any man; and 
from the little strange creature no utterance could be ever 
got. 

But the child who had come in the night and the snow 
tarried at Ypres from that time thenceforward. 

Claudis Flamma nourished, sheltered, clothed her ; but 
he did all these begrudgingly, harshly, scantily ; and he 
did all these with an acrid hate and scorn, which did not 
cease but rather grew with time. 

The blow which had been her earliest welcome was not 
the last that she received from him by many ; and whilst 
she was miserable exceedingly, she showed it, not as 
children do, but rather like some chained and untamed 
animal, in tearless stupor and in sudden, sharp ferocity. 
And this the more because she spoke but a very few 
words of the language of the people among whom she 
had been brought ; her own tongue was one full of round 
vowels and strange sounds, a tongue unknown to them. 

For many weeks he said not one word to her, cast not 
one look at her ; he let her lead the same life that was 
led by the brutes that crawled in the timbers, or by the 
pigs that couched and were kicked in the straw. The 
woman Pitchou gave her such poor scraps of garments 
or of victuals as she chose ; she could crouch in the 
corner of the hearth where the fire warmth reached ; she 
could sleep in the hay in the little loft under the roof ; so 
much she could do and no more. 

After that first moment in which her vague appeal for 
pity and for rest had been answered by the blow that 
struck her senseless, the child had never made a moan, 
nor sought for any solace. 

All the winter through she lay curled up on the tiles 
by the fence, with her arms round the great body of the 
dog and his head upon her chest ; they were both starved. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


39 


beaten, kicked, and scourged, with brutal words often- 
times; they had the community of misfortune, and they 
loved one another. 

The blow on her head, the coldness of the season, the 
scanty food that was cast to her, all united to keep her 
brain stupefied and her body almost motionless. She 
was like a young bear that is motherless, wounded, 
frozen, famished, but which, coiled in an almost con- 
tinual slumber, keeps its blood flowing and its limbs alive. 
And, like the bear, with the spring she awakened. 

When the townsfolk and the peasants came to the 
mill, and first saw this creature there, with her wondrous 
vivid hues, and her bronzed half-naked limbs, they re- 
garded her in amazement, and asked the miller whence 
she came. He set his teeth, and answered ever : 

“ The woman that bore her was Reine Flamma.’’ 

The avowal was a penance set to himself, but to it he 
never added more ; and they feared his bitter temper and 
his caustic tongue too greatly to press it on him, or even 
to ask him whether his daughter were with the living or 
the dead. 

With the unfolding of the young leaves, and the 
loosening of the frost-bound waters, and the unveiling 
of the violet and the primrose under the shadows of the 
wood, all budding life revives, and so did hers. For she 
could escape from the dead, cold, bitter atmosphere of 
the silent loveless house, where her bread was begrudged, 
and the cudgel was her teacher, out into the freshness and 
the living sunshine of the young blossoming world, where 
the birds and the beasts and tender blue flowers and 
the curling green boughs were her comrades, and where 
she could stretch her limbs in freedom, and coil herself 
among the branches, and steep her limbs in the coolness 
of waters, and bathe her aching feet in the moisture of 
rain-filled grasses. 

With the- spring she arose, the true forest animal she 
was ; wild, fleet, incapable of fear, sure of foot, in unison 
with all the things of the earth and the air, and stirred by 
them to a strange, dumb, ignorant, passionate gladness. 

She had been scarce seen in the winter ; with the 
breaking of the year the people from more distant places 


40 


FOLLE-FARTNE. 


who rode their mules down to the mill on their various 
errands stared at this child, and wondered among’ them- 
selves gi'eatly, and at length asked Claudis Flainma 
whence she came. 

He answered ever, setting hard his teeth : 

“The woman that bore her was one accursed, whom 
men deemed a saint — Heine Flamma.’’ 

And he never added more. To tell the truth, the hor- 
rible, biting, burning, loathsome truth, was a penance 
that he had set to himself, and from which he never 
wavered. 

They dared not ask him more; for many were his 
debtors, and all feared his scourging tongue. But when 
they went away, and gossiped among themselves by the 
wayside well or under the awnings of the market-stalls, 
they said to one another that it was just as they had 
thought long ago ; the creature had been no better than 
her kind ; and they had never credited the fable that God 
had taken her, though they had humored the miller be- 
cause he was aged and in dotage. Whilst one old woman, 
a withered and witchlike crone, who had toiled in from 
the fishing village with a creel upon her back and the 
smell of the sea about her rags, heard, standing in the 
market-place, and laughed, and mocked them, these seers 
who were so wise after the years had gone, and when 
the truth was clear. 

“You knew, you knew, you knew!” she echoed, with 
a grin upon her face. “ Oh, yes ! you were so wise 1 
Who said seven years through that Heine Flamma was 
a saint, and taken by the saints into their keeping ? And 
who hissed at me for a foul-mouthed crone when I said 
that the devil had more to do with her than the good 
God, and that the black-browed gypsy, with jewels for 
eyes in his head, like the toad, was the only master to 
whom she gave herself ? Oh-hh, you were so wise 1” 

So she mocked them, and they were ashamed, and 
held their peace ; well knowing that indeed no creature 
among them had ever been esteemed so pure, so chaste, 
and so honored of heaven as had been the miller’s 
daughter. 

Many remembered the “ gypsy with the jeweled eyes,” 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


41 


and saw those brilliant, fathomless, midnight eyes repro- 
duced in the small rich face of the child whom Keine 
Flamma, as her own father said, had borne in shame whilst 
they had been glorifying her apotheosis. And it came 
to be said, as time went on, that this unknown stranger 
had been the fiend himself, taking human shape for the 
destruction of one pure soul, and the mocking of all true 
, children of the church. 

Legend and tradition still held fast their minds in this 
remote, ancient, and priest-ridden place ; in their belief the 
devil was still a living power, traversing the earth and 
air in search of souls, and not seldom triumphing: of 
metaphor or myth they were ignorant, Satan to them 
was a personality, terrific, and oftentimes irresistible, 
assuming at will shapes grotesque or awful, human or 
spiritual. Their forefathers had beheld him ; why not 
they ? 

So the henhucksters and poulterers, the cider-makers 
and tanners, the fisherfolk from the seaboard, and the 
peasant proprietors from the country round, came at 
length in all seriousness to regard the young child at 
Ypres as a devil-born thing. “She was hell-begotten,” 
they would mutter when they saw her; and they would 
cross themselves, and avoid her if they could. 

The time had gone by, unhappily, as they considered, 
when men had been permitted to burn such creatures as 
this; they knew it and were sorry for it; the world, 
they thought, had been better when Jews had blazed like 
torches, and witches had crackled like firewood ; such 
treats were forbidden now, they knew, but many, for all 
that, thought within themselves that it was a pity it should 
be so, and that it was mistaken mercy in the age they 
lived in which forbade the purifying of the earth by fire 
of such as she. 

In the winter-time, when they first saw her, unusual 
floods swept the country, and destroyed much of their 
property; in the spring which followed there were mil- 
dew and sickness everywhere ; in the summer there was 
a long drought, and by consequence there came a bad 
harvest, and great suffering and scarcity. 

There were not a few in the district who attributed all 

4 * 


42 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


tliese woes to the advent of the child of darkness, and 
who niurniured openly in their huts and homesteads that 
no good would befall them so long as this offspring of 
hell were suffered in their midst. 

Since, however,* the time was past when the broad 
market-place could have been filled with a curious, breath- 
less, eager crowd, and the gray cathedral have grown red 
in the glare of flames fed by a young living body, they 
held their hands from doing her harm, and said these 
things only in their own ingle-nooks, and contented them- 
selves with forbidding their children to consort with her, 
and with drawing their mules to the other side of the 
road when they met her. They did not mean to be cruel, 
they only acted in their own self-defense, and dealt with 
her as their fellow-countrymen dealt with a cagote — 
‘‘ only.” 

Hence, when, with the reviving year the child’s dulled 
brain awakened, and all the animal activity in her sprang 
into vigorous action, she found herself shunned, marked, 
and glanced at with averted looks of mingled dread and 
scurn. “A daughter of the devil I” she heard again and 
again muttered as they passed her ; she grew to take 
shelter in this repute as in a fortress, and to be proud, 
with a savage pride, of her imputed origin. 

It made her a little fierce, mute, fearless, reckless, all- 
daring, and all-enduring animal. An animal in her fe- 
rocities, her mute instincts, her supreme patience, her 
physical perfectness of body and of health. Perfect of 
shape and hue ; full of force to resist ; ignorant either of 
hope or fear; desiring only one thing, liberty; with no 
knowledge, but with unerring instinct. 

She was at an age when happier creatures have scarce 
escaped from their mother’s arms ; but she had not even 
thus early a memory of her mother, and she had been 
shaken off to live or die, to fight or famish, as a young 
fox whose dam has been flung to the hounds is driven 
away to starve in the winter woods, or save himself, if 
he have strength, by slaughter. 

She was a tame animal only in one thing: she took 
blows uncomplainingly, and as though comprehending 
that they were her inevitable portion. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


43 


“ The child of the devil 1” they said. In a dumb, half- 
uuconscious fashion, this hve-year-old creature wondered 
sometimes why the devil had not been good enough to 
give her a skin that would not feel, and veins that would 
not bleed. 

She had always been beaten ever since her birth ; she 
was beaten here ; she thought it a law of life, as other 
children think it such to have their mother’s kiss and 
their daily food and nightly prayer. 

Claudis Flamma did after this manner his duty by her. 
She was to him a thing accursed, possessed, loathsome, 
imbued with evil from her origin ; but he did what he 
deemed his duty. He clothed her, if scantily ; he fed her, 
if meagerly ; he lashed her with all the caustic gibes that 
came naturally to his tongue ; he set her hard tasks to 
keep her from idleness ; he beat her when she did not, 
and not seldom when she did, them. He dashed holy 
water on her many times ; and used a stick to her with- 
out mercy. 

After this light he did his duty. That he should 
hate her, was to fulfill a duty also in his eyes; he had 
always been told that it was right to abhor the things 
of darkness ; and to him she was a thing of utter dark- 
ness, a thing born of the black ruin of a stainless soul, 
begotten by the pollution and corruption of an infernal 
tempter. 

He never questioned her as to her past — that short 
past, like the span of an insect’s life, which yet had suf- 
ficed to gift her with passions, with instincts, with de- 
sires, even with memories, — in a word, with character ; — 
a character he could neither change nor break; a thing 
formed already, for good or for evil, abidingly. 

He never spoke to her except in sharp irony or in curt 
command. He set her hard tasks of bodily labor which 
she did not dispute, but accomplished so far as her small 
strength lay, with a mute dogged patience, half ferocity, 
half passiveness. 

In those first winter days of her arrival he called her 
Folle-Farine ; taking the most worthless, the most use- 
less, the most abject, the most despised thing he knew in 
all his daily life from which to name her ; and the name 


44 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


adhered to her, and was the only one by which she was 
ever known. 

Folle-Farine I — as one may say, the Dust. 

In time she grew to believe that it was really hers ; 
even as in time she began to forget that strange, deep, 
rich tongue in which she had babbled her first words, 
and to know no other tongue than the Norman-French 
about her. 

Yet in her there existed imagination, tenderness, grati- 
tude, and a certain wild and true nobility, though the old 
man Flamma would never have looked for them, never 
have believed in them. She was devil-born : she was 
of devil nature: in his eyes. 

Upon his own mill-ditch, foul and fetid, refuse would 
sometimes gather, and receiving the seed of the lily, 
would give birth to blossoms born stainless out of cor- 
ruption. But the allegory had no meaning for him. 
Had any one pointed it out to him he would have taken 
the speaker into his orchard, and said : 

“ Will the crab bear a fruit not bitter ? Will the night- 
shade give out sweetness and honey ? Fool ! — as the 
stem so the branch, as the sap so the blossom.’’ 

And this fruit of sin and shame was poison in his 
sight. 


CHAPTER lY. 

The little dim mind of the five-year-old child was not 
a blank ; it was indeed filled to overflowing with pictures 
that her tongue could not have told of, even had she 
spoken the language of the people amidst whom she had 
been cast. 

A land altogether unlike that in which she had been 
set down that bitter night of snow and storm : a land 
noble and wild, and full of color, broken into vast heights 
and narrow valleys, clothed with green beech woods and 
with forests of oak and of walnut, filled with the noise 
of torrents leaping from crag to crag, and of brown 


FOLLE^FARINE. 


45 


mountain-streams rushing broad and angry through 
wooded raviues. A land, made beautiful by moss-grown 
water-mills, and lofty gateways of gray rock ; and still 
shadowy pools, in which the bright fish leaped, and 
mules’ bells that rang drowsily through leafy gorges; 
and limestone crags that pierced the clouds, spirelike, 
and fantastic in a thousand shapes ; and high blue crests 
of snow-topped mountains, whose pinnacles glowed to 
the divinest flush of rose and amber with the setting of 
the sun. 

This land she remembered vaguely, yet gloriously, as 
the splendors of a dream of Paradise rest on the brain 
of some young sleeper wakening in squalor, cold, and 
pain. But the people of the place she had been brought 
to could not comprehend her few, shy, sullen words, and 
her strange, imperfect trills of song ; and she could not 
tell them that this land had been no realm enchanted 
of fairy or of fiend, but only the forest region of the 
Liebana. 

Thither, one rich autumn day, a tribe of gypsies had 
made their camp. Tiiey were a score in all ; they held 
themselves one of the noblest branches of their wide 
family; they were people with pure Eastern blood in 
them, and all the grace and the gravity of the Oriental in 
their forms and postures. 

They stole horses and sheep ; they harried cattle ; 
they stopped the mules in the passes, and lightened their 
load of wine-skins : they entered the posada, when they 
deigned to enter one at all, with neither civil question 
nor show of purse, but with a gleam of the teeth, like 
a threatening dog, and the flash of the knife, half drawn 
out of the girdle. They were low thieves and mean 
liars; wild daredevils and loose livers; leathers of labor 
and lovers of idle days and plundering nights ; yet they 
were beautiful, with the noble, calm, scornful beauty of 
the East, and they wore their rags with an air that was 
in itself an empire. 

They could play, too, in heavenly fashion, on their old 
three-stringed viols; and when their wmmen danced on 
the sward by moonlight, under the broken shadows of 
some Moorish ruin, clanging high their tambourines 


46 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


above their graceful heads, and tossing the shining se- 
quins that bound their heavy hair, the muleteer or the 
herdsman, seeing them from afar, shook with fear, and 
thought of the tales told him in his childhood by his 
grandam of the spirits of the dead Moors that rose to re- 
velry, at midnight, in the haunts of their old lost kingdom. 

Among them was a man yet more handsome than 
the rest, taller and lither still ; wondrous at heaping and 
wrestling, and all athletic things ; surest of any to win a 
woman, to tame a horse, to strike down a bull at a blow, 
to silence an angry group at a 'wineshop with a single 
glance of his terrible eyes. 

His name was Taric. 

He had left them often to wa.nder by himself into many 
countries, and at times when, by talent or by terrorism, 
he had netted gold enough to play the fool to his fancy, 
he had gone to some strange city, where credulity and 
luxury prevailed, and there had lived like a prince, as his 
own phrase ran, and gamed and intrigued, and feasted, 
and roystered right royally whilst his gains lasted. 

Those spent, he would always return awhile, and lead 
the common, roving, thieving life of his friends and breth- 
ren, till the fit of ambition or the run of luck were again 
on him. Then his people would afresh lose sight of 
him to light on him, velvet-clad, and wine-bibbing, in 
some painter’s den in some foreign town, or welcome him 
ragged, famished, and footweary, on their own sunburnt 
sierras. 

And the mystery of his ways endeared him to them ; 
and they made him welcome whenever he returned, and 
never quarreled with him for his faithlessness; but if 
there were anything wilder or wickeder, bolder or keener, 

on hand than was usual, his tribe would alwavs say 

“ Let Taric lead.’’ 

One day their camp was made in a gorge under the 
great shadows of the Picos da Europa, a place that they 
loved much, and settled in often, finding the chestnut 
woods and the cliff caverns fair for shelter, the heather 
abounding in grouse, and the pools full of trout, fair for 
feeding. That day Taric returned from a year-long ab- 
sence, suddenly standing, dark and mighty, between 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


47 


them and the light, as they lay around their soup- 
kettle, awaiting their evening meal. 

“ There is a woman in labor, a league back ; by the 
great cork-tree, against the bridge,’’ he said to them. 
“ Go to her some of you.” 

And, with a look to the women which singled out two 
for the errand, he stretched himself in the warmth of the 
fire, and helped himself to the soup, and lay quiet, vouch- 
safing them never a word, but playing meaningly with 
the knife handle thrust into liis shirt ; for he saw that 
some of the men were about to oppose his share of a 
common meal which he had not earned by a common 
right. 

It was Taric — a name of some terror came to their 
fierce souls. 

Taric, the strongest and fleetest and most well favored 
of them all ; Taric, who had slain the bull that all the 
matadors had failed to daunt ; Taric, who had torn, up 
the young elm, when they needed a bridge over a flood, 
as easily as a child plucks up a reed ; Taric, who had 
stopped the fiercest contrabandista in all those parts, and 
cut the man’s throat with no more ado than a butcher 
slits a lamb’s. 

So they were silent, and let him take his portion of the 
fire and of the broth, and of the thin red wine. 

Meanwhile the two gypsies, Quila and Zard, went on 
their quest, and found things as he had said. 

Under the great cork-tree, where the grass was long 
and damp, and the wood grew thickly, and an old rude 
bridge of unhewn blocks of rock spanned, with one arch, 
the river as it rushed downward from its limestone bed 
aloft, they found a woman just dead and a child just 
born. 

Quita looked the woman all over hastil}^, to see if, by 
any chance, any gold or jewels might be on her; there 
were none. There was only an ivory cross on her chest, 
which Quita drew off and hid. Quita covered her with 
a few boughs and left her. 

Zara wrapped the child in a bit of her woolen skirt, 
and held it warm in her breast, and hastened to the camp 
with it. 


48 


FOLLE-FARINE, 


She is dead, Taric,” said Quit^l, meaning the woman 
she had left. 

He nodded his handsome head. 

“ This is yours, Taric V said Zard, meaning the child 
she held. 

He nodded again, and drank another drop of wine, and 
stretched himself. 

“ What shall we do with her?” asked Quitk. 

“ Let her lie there,” he answered her. 

“ What shall we do with it?” asked Zard,. 

He laughed, and drew his knife against his own brown 
throat in a significant gesture. 

Zara said no word to him, but she went away with the 
child under some branches, on which was hung a tattered 
piece of awning, orange striped, that marked her own 
especial resting-place. 

Out of the group about the fire, one man, rising, ad- 
vanced, and looked Taric full in the eyes. 

“ Has the woman died by foul means ?” 

Taric, who never let any living soul molest or menace 
him, answered him without offense, and with a savage 
candor, — 

“ No — that I swear. I used no foul play against her. 
Go look at her if you like. I loved her well enough 
while she lived. But what does that matter? She is 
dead. So best. Women are as many as the mulberries.” 

“You loved her, and you will let the wolves eat her 
body ?” 

Taric laughed. 

“ There are no wolves in Liebana. Go and bury her 
if you choose, Phratos.” 

“I will,” the other answered him; and he took his 
way to the cork-tree by the bridge. 

The man who spoke was called Phratos. 

He was not like his tribe in anything ; except in a 
mutual love for a life that wandered always, and was to 
no man responsible, and needed no roof-tree, and wanted 
no settled habitation, but preferred to dwell wild with the 
roe and the cony, and to be hungry and unclad, rather 
than to eat the good things of the earth in submission 
and in durance. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


49 


He had not their physical perfection: an accident at 
his birth had made his spine misshapen, and his gait 
halting. His features would have been grotesque in their 
ugliness, except for the sweet pathos of the eyes and the 
gay archness of the mouth. 

Among a race noted for its singular beauty of face 
and form, Phratos alone was deformed and unlovely ; 
and yet both deformity and unloveliness were in a way 
poetic and uncommon ; and in his rough sheepskin gar- 
ments, knotted to his waist with a leathern thong, and 
with his thick tangled hair falling down on his shoulders, 
they were rather the deformity of the brake-haunting faun, 
the unloveliness of the moon-dancing satyr, than those of 
a man and a vagrant. With the likeness he had the tem- 
per of the old dead gods of the forests and rivers; he 
loved music, and could make it, in all its innumerable 
sighs and songs, give a voice to all creatures and things 
of the world, of the waters and the woodlands ; and for 
many things he was sorrowful continually, and for other 
things he forever laughed and was glad. 

Though he was misshapen, and even, as some said, not 
altogether straight in his wits, yet his kin honored him. 

For he could draw music from the rude strings of his 
old viol that surpassed their own melodies as far as the 
shining of the sun on the summits of the Europa sur- 
passed the trembling of the little lamps under the painted 
roadside Cavaries. 

He was only a gypsy ; he only played as the fancy 
moved him, by a bright fountain at a noonday halt, under 
the ruined arches of a Saracenic temple, before the tawny 
gleam of a vast dim plain at sunrise ; in a cool shadowy 
court where the vines shut out all light; beneath a bal- 
cony at night, when the moonbeams gleamed on some 
fair unknown face, thrust for a moment from the darkness 
through the white magnolia flowers. Yet he played in 
suchwise as makes women weep, and holds children and 
dogs still to listen, and moves grown men to shade their 
eyes with their hands, and think of old dead times, when 
they played and prayed at their mothers’ knees. 

And his music had so spoken to himself that, although 
true to his tribe and all their traditions, loving the va- 

5 


50 


FOLLE-FARTNE. 


grant life in the open air, and being incapable of pursuing 
any other, he yet neither stole nor slew, neither tricked 
nor lied, but found his way vaguely to honesty and can- 
dor, and, having found them, clove to them, so that none 
could turn him; living on such scant gains as were 
thrown to him for his music from balconies and po- 
sada windows and winehouse doors in the hamlets and 
towns through which he passed, and making a handful 
of pulse and a slice of melon, a couch of leaves and a 
draught of water, suffice to him for his few and simple 
wants. 

His people reproached him, indeed, with demeaning 
their race by taking payment in lieu of making thefts; 
and they mocked him often, and taunted him, though in 
a manner they all loved him, — the reckless and blood- 
stained Taric most, perhaps, of all. But he would never 
quarrel with them, neither would he give over his strange 
ways which so incensed them, and with time they saw 
that Phratos was a gifted fool, who, like other mad sim- 
ple creatures, had best be left to go on his own way 
unmolested and without contradiction. 

If, too, they had driven him from their midst, they 
would have missed his music sorely; that music whicli 
awoke them at break of day soaring up through their 
roof of chestnut leaves like a lark’s song piercing the 
skies. ‘ . t 

Phratos came now to the dead woman, and drew off 
the boughs, and looked at her. She was quite dead. 
She had died where she had first sunk down, unable to 
reach her promised resting-place. It was a damp green 
nook on the edge of the bright mountain-river, at the 
entrance of that narrow gorge in which the encampment 
had been made. 

The face, which was white and young, lay upward, 
with the shadows of the flickering foliage on it; and the 
eyes, which Quita had not closed, were large and blue ; 
her hair, which was long and brown, was loose, and had 
got wet among the grass, and had little buds of flowers 
and stray golden leaves twisted in it. 

Phratos felt sorrow for her as he looked. 

He could imagine her history. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


51 


Taric, whom many women had loved, had besought, 
many a one thus to share his fierce free life for a little 
space, and tl)en drift away out of it by chance, or be 
driven away from it by his fickle passions, or be taken 
away like this one by death. 

In her bosom, slipped in her clothes, was a letter. It 
was written in a tongue he did not know. He held 
it awhile, thinking, then he folded it up and put it in his 
girdle, — it might be of use, who could tell ? There was 
the child, there, that might live; unless the camp broke 
up, and Zara left it under a walnut-tree to die, with the 
last butterflies of the fading summer, which was in all 
likelihood all she would do. 

Nevertheless he kept the letter, and when he had 
looked long enough at the dead creature, he turned to the 
tools he had brought with him, and set patiently to make 
her grave. 

He could only work slowly, for he was weak of body, 
and his infirmity made all manual toil painful to him. 
Plis task was hard, even though the earth was so soft 
from recent heavy rains. 

The sun set whilst he was still engaged on it; and it 
was quite nightfall before he had fully accomplished it. 
When the grave was ready he filled it carefully with the 
golden leaves that had fallen, and the thick many-colored 
mosses that covered the ground like a carpet. 

Then he laid the body tenderly down within that forest 
shroud, and, with the moss like a winding-sheet between 
it and the earth which had to fall on it, he committed the 
dead woman to her resting-place. 

It did not seem strange to him, or awful, to leave her 
there. 

He was a gypsy, and to him the grave under a forest- 
tree and by a mountain-stream seemed the most natural 
rest at last that any creature could desire or claim. No 
rites seemed needful to him, and no sense of any neglect, 
cruel or unfitting, jarred on him in thus leaving her in her 
loneliness, with only the cry of the bittern or the bell of 
the wild roe as a requiem. 

Yet a certain sorrow for this unknown and lost life was 
on him, bohemian though he was, as he took up his mat- 


52 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


tock and turned away, and went backward down the 
gorge, and left her to lie there forever, through rain and 
sunshine, through wind and storm, through the calm of 
the summer and the flush of the autumn, and the wildness 
of the winter, when the swollen stream should sweep 
above her tomb, and the famished beasts of the hills would 
lift up their voices around it. 

When he reached the camp, he gave the letter to Taric. 

Taric, knowing the tongue it was written in, and being 
able to understand the character, looked at it and read it 
through by the light of the flaming wood. When he had 
done so he tossed it behind, !n among the boughs, in scorn. 

“ The poor fool’s prayer to the brute that she hated I” 
he said, with a scoff. 

Phratos lifted up the letter and kept it. 

In a later time he found some one who could decipher 
it for him. 

It was the letter of Reine Flamma to the miller at 
Ypres, telling him the brief story of her fatal passion, and 
imploring from him mercy to her unborn child should it 
survive her and be ever taken to him. 

Remorse and absence had softened to her the harshness 
and the meanness of her father’s character ; she only re- 
membered that he had loved her, and had deemed her 
pure and faithful as the saints of God. There was no 
word in the appeal by which it could have been inferred 
that Claudis Flamma had been other than a man much 
wronged and loving much, patient of heart, and without 
blame in his simple life. 

Phratos took the letter and cherished it. He thought 
it might some day save her offspring. This old man’s 
vengeance could not, he thought, be so cruel to the child 
as might be the curse and the knife of Taric. 

“ She must have been beautiful ?” said Phratos to him, 
after awhile, that night ; “ and you care no more for her 
than that.” 

Taric stretched his mighty limbs in the warmth of the 
flame and made his answer : 

“ There will be as good grapes on the vines next year 
as any we gathered this. What does it signify ? — she 
was only a woman. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


53 


“ She loved me ; she thought me a god, a devil, a 
prince, a chief, — all manner of things ; — the people 
thought so too. She was sick of her life. She was sick 
of the priests and the beads, and the mill and the mar- 
ket. She was fair to look at, and the fools called her a 
saint. When a woman is young and has beauty, it is 
dull to be worshiped — in that way. 

“ I met her in the wood one summer night. The sun 
was setting. I do not know why I cared for her — I did. 
She was like a tall white lily ; these women of ours are 
only great tawny sunflowers. 

‘‘ She was pure and straight of life ; she believed in 
"'heaven and hell; she was innocent as the child unborn ; 
it was tempting to kill all that. It is so easy to kill it 
when a woman loves you. I taught her what passion 
and freedom and pleasure and torment all meant. She 
came with me, — after a struggle, a hard one. I kept her 
loyally while the gold lasted ; that I swear. I took her 
to many cities. I let her have jewels and music, and 
silk dresses, and fine linen. I was good to her ; that I 
swear. 

“But after a bit she pined, and grew dull again, and 
wept in secret, and at times I caught her praying to the 
white cross which she wore on her breast. That made 
me mad. I cursed her and beat her. She never said 
anything; she seemed only to love me more, and that 
made me more mad. 

“Then I got poor again, and I had to sell her things 
one by one. Not that she minded that, she would have 
sold her soul for me. We wandered north and south ; 
and I made money sometimes by the dice, or by breaking 
a horse, or by fooling a woman, or by snatching a jewel 
off one of theh- dolls in their churches ; and I wanted to 
get rid of her, and I could not tell how. I had not the 
heart to kill her outright. 

“ But she never said a rough word, you know, and 
that makes a man mad. Maddalena or Kara or Rachel 
— any of them — would have flown and struck a knife 
at me, and hissed like a snake, and there would have 
been blows and furious words and bloodshed ; and then 
we should have kissed, and been lovers again, fast and 

5 * 


64 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


fierce. But a woman who is quiet, and only looks at 
you with great, sad, soft eyes, when you strike her, — 
what is one to do ? 

“We were horribly poor at last: we slept in barn^ 
and haylofts ; we ate berries and drank the brook-water. 
She grew weak, and could hardly walk. Many a time 
I have been tempted to let her lie and die in the hedge- 
way or on the plains, and I did not, — one is so foolish 
sometimes for sake of a woman. She knew she was a 
burden and curse to me, — I may have said so, perhaps ; 
I do not remember. 

“ At last I heard of you in the Liebana, from a tribe 
we fell in with on the other side of the mountains, and 
so we traveled here on foot. I thought she would have 
got to the women before her hour arrived. But she fell 
down there, and could not stir: and so the end came. 
It is best as it is. She was wretched, and what could I 
do with a woman like that? who would never hearken to 
another lover, nor give up her dead God on his cross, 
nor take so much as a broken crust if it were stolen, nor 
even show her beauty to a sculptor to be car-ved in stone 
— for I tried to make her do that, and she would not. 
It is best as it is. If she had lived we could have done 
nothing with her. And yet I see her sometimes as I 
saw her that night, so white and so calm, in the little 
green wood, as the sun set ” 

His voice ceased, and he took up a horn full of vino 
clarete ; and drained it ; and was very still, stretching 
his limbs to bask in the heat of the fire. The wine had 
loosened his tongue, and he had spoken from his heart, — 
truthfully. 

Phratos, his only hearer, was silent. 

He was thinking of the great blue sightless eyes that 
he bad closed, and of the loose brown hair on which he 
had flung the wet leaves and the earth-clogged mosses. 

“ The child lives ?” he said at length. 

Taric, who was sinking to sleep after the long fatigues 
of a heavy tramp through mountain-passes, stirred sul- 
lenly with an oath. 

“Let it go to hell I” he made answer. 

And these were the only words of baptism that were 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


55 


spoken over the nameless daughter of Taric the gypsy 
and of Reine Flamma. 

That night Phratos called out to him in the moonlight 
the woman Zara, who came from under her tent, and 
stood under the glistening leaves, strong and handsome, 
with shining eyes and snowy teeth. 

“ The child lives still he asked. 

Zara nodded her head. 

“ You will try and keep it alive ?’’ he pursued. 

She shrugged her shoulders. 

‘‘ What is the use ? Taric would rather it were dead.” 

“What matter what Taric wishes. Living or dead, it 
will not hinder him. A child more or less with us, 
what is it ? Only a draught of goat’s milk or a handful 
of meal. So little ; it cannot be felt. You have a child 
of your own, Zara ; you cared for it ?” 

“ Yes,” she answered, with a sudden softening gleam 
of her bright savage eyes. 

She had a brown, strong, year-old boy, who kicked his 
naked limbs on the sward with joy at Phratos’s music. 

“ Then have pity on this motherless creature,” said 
Phratos, wooingly. “ I buried that dead woman ; and 
her eyes, though there was no sight in them, still seemed 
to pray to mine — and to pray for her child. Be merciful, 
Zara. Let the child have the warmth of your arms’ and 
the defense of your strength. Be merciful, Zara; and 
your seed shall multiply and increase tenfold, and shall 
be stately and strong, and shall spread as the branches 
of the plane-trees, on which the storm spends its fury 
in vain, and beneath which all things- of the earth can 
find refuge. For never was a woman’s pity fruitless, 
nor the fair deeds of her days without recompense.” 

Zara listened quietly, as the dreamy, poetic, persuasive 
words stole on her ear like music. Like the rest of her 
people, she half believed in him as a seer and prophet; 
her teeth shone out in a soft sudden smile. 

“You are always a fool, Phratos,” she said; “but it 
shall be as you fancy.” 

And she went in out of the moonlit leaves and the 
clear cool, autumn night into the little dark stiffling tent, 
where the new-born child had been laid away in a cor- 


56 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


ner upon a rough-and-ready bed of gathered dusky fir- 
needles. 

“ It is a little cub, not worth the saving; and its dam 
was not of our people,” she said to herself^ as she lifted 
the wailing and alien creature to her bosom.' 

“ It is for you, my angel, that I do it,” she murmured, 
looking at the sleeping face of her own son. 

Outside the tent the sweet strains of Phratos’s music 
rose sighing and soft; and mingling, as sounds mingle in 
a dream, with the murmurs of the forest leaves and the 
rushing of the mountain-river. He gave her the only 
payment in his power. 

Zara, hushing the strange child at her breast, listened, 
and was half touched, half angered. 

“ Why should he play for this little stray thing, when 
he never played once for you, my glory ?” she said to 
her son, as she put the dead woman’s child roughly 
away, and took him up in its stead, to beat together in 
play his rosy hands and cover his mouth with kisses. 

For even from these, the world’s outcasts, this new life 
of a few hours’ span was rejected as unworthy and de- 
spised. 

Nevertheless, the music played on through the still 
forest night ; and nevertheless, the child grew and 
throve. 

The tribe of Taric abode in the Liebana or in the ad- 
jacent country along the banks of the Deva during the 
space of four years and more, scarcely losing in that 
time the sight, either from near or far, of the rosy peaks 
of the Europa. 

He did not abide with them ; he quarreled with them 
violently concerning some division of a capture of wine- 
skins, and went on his own way to distant provinces and 
cities ; to the gambling and roystering, the woman- 
fooling and the bull-fighting, that this soul lusted after 
always. 

His daughter he left to dwell in the tent of Zara, and 
under the defense of Phratos. 

Once or twice, in sojourns of a night or two among 
his own people, as the young creature grew in stature 
and strength, Taric had glanced at her, and called her to 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


57 


him, and felt the litheness of her limbs and the weight of 
her hair, and laughed as he thrust her from him, think- 
ing, in time to come, she — who would know nothing of 
her mother’s dead God on the cross, and of her mother’s 
idle, weak scruples — might bring him a fair provision iu 
his years of age, when his hand should have lost its weight 
against men and his form its goodliness in the sight of 
women. 

Once or twice he had given her a kick of his foot, or 
blow with his leathern whip, when she crawled in the 
grass too near his path, or lay asleep in the sun as he 
chanced to pass by her. 

Otherwise he had naught to do with her, absent or 
present; otherwise he left her to chance and the devil, 
who were, as he said, according to the Christians, the 
natural patrons and sponsors of all love-children. Chance 
and the Devil, however, had not wholly their way in the 
Liebana ; for besides them there was Phratos. 

Phratos never abandoned her. 

Under the wolfskin and pineboughs of Zara’s tent there 
was misery very often. 

Zara had a fresh son born to her with each succeeding 
year ; and having a besotted love for her own offspring, 
had little but indifference and blows for the stranger who 
shared their bed and food. Her children, brown and 
curly, naked and strong, fought one another like panther 
cubs, and rode in a cluster like red mountain-ash berries 
in the sheepskin round her waist, and drank by turns out 
of the pitcher of broth, and slept all together on dry ferns 
and mosses, rolled in warm balls one in another like 
young bears. 

But the child who had no afiQnity with them, who was 
not even wholly of their tribe, but had in her what they 
deemed the taint of gentile blood, was not allowed to 
gnaw her bare bone or her ripe fig in peace if they wished 
for it ; was never carried with them in the sheepskin nest, 
but left to totter after in the dust or mud as best she 
might ; was forced to wait for the leavings in the pitcher, 
or go without if leavings there were none; and was 
kicked away by the sturdy limbs of these young males 
when she tried to creep for warmth’s sake in among 


58 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


them on their fern bed. But she minded all this little ; 
since in the Liebana there was Phratos. 

Phratos was always good to her. The prayer which 
those piteoua.dead eyes had made he always answered. 
He had always pity for the child. 

Many a time, but for his remembrance, she would have 
starved outright or died of cold in those wild winters 
when the tribe huddled together in the caverns of the 
limestone, and the snow-drifts were driven up by the 
northern winds and blocked them there for many days. 
Many a time but for his aid she would have dropped on 
their march and been left to perish as she might on the 
long sunburnt roads, in the arid midsummers, when the 
gypsies plodded on their dusty way through the sinuous 
windings of hillside paths and along the rough stones of 
dried-up water-courses, in gorges and passages known 
alone to them and the wild deer. 

When her throat was parched with the torment of long 
thirst, it was he who raised her to drink from the rill in 
the rock, high above, to which the mothers lifted their 
eager children, leaving her to gasp and gaze unpitied. 
When she was driven away from the noonday meal by 
the hungry and clamorous youngsters, who would admit 
no share of their partridge broth and stewed lentils, it 
was he who bruised the maize between stones for her 
eating, and gathered for her the wild fruit of the quince 
and the mulberry. 

When the sons of Zara had kicked and bruised and 
spurned her from the tent, he would lead her away to 
some shadowy place where the leaves grew thickly, "and 
play to her such glad and buoyant tunes that the laughter 
seemed to bubble from the listening brooks and ripple 
among the swinging boughs, and make the wild hare 
skip with joy, and draw the timid lizard from his hole to 
frolic. And when the way was long, and the stony paths 
cruel to her little bare feet, he would carry her aloft on 
his misshapen shoulders, where his old viol always trav- 
eled ; and would beguile the steep way with a thousand 
quaint, soft, grotesque conceits of all the flowers and 
leaves and birds and animals: talking rather to himself 
than her, yet talking with a tender fancifulness, half 


FOLLE-FARINE 


59 


humor and half pathos, that soothed her tired senses like 
a lullaby. Hence it came to pass that the sole creature 
whom she loved and who had pity for her was the un- 
couth, crippled, gay, sad, gentle, dauntless creature whom 
his tribe had always held half wittol and half seer. 

Thus the life in the hills of the Liebana went on till the 
child of Taric had entered her sixth year. 

She had both beauty and grace ; she had the old Mo- 
resco loveliness in its higher type ; she was tleet as the 
roe, strong as the young izard, wild as the wood-pa, rtridge 
on the wing; she had grace of limb from the postures and 
dances with which she taught herself to keep time to the 
fantastic music of the viol ; she was shy and sullen, tierce 
and savage, to all save himself, for the hand of every 
other was against her; but to him, she was docile as 
the dove to the hand that feeds it. He had given her a 
string of bright sequins to hang on her hair, and when 
the peasants of the mountains and valleys saw her by the 
edge of some green woodland pool, whirling by moon- 
light to the sound of his melodies, they took her to be 
some unearthly spirit, and told wonderful things over 
their garlic of the elf crowned with stars they had seen 
dancing on a round lotos-leaf in the hush of the night. 

In the Liebana she was beaten often, hungry almost 
always, cursed fiercely, driven away by the mothers, 
mocked and flouted by the children; and this taught her 
silence and ferocity. Yet in the Liebana she was happy, 
for one creature loved her, and she was free — free to lie 
in the long grass, to bathe in the still pools, to watch the 
wild things of the woods, to wander ankle-deep in forest 
blossoms, to sleep under the rocking of pines, to run 
against the sweet force of the wind, to climb the trees 
and swing cradled in leaves, and to look far away at the 
snow on the mountains, and to dream, and to love, and 
to be content in dreaming and loving, their mystical 
glory that awoke with the sun. 

One day in the red autumn, Taric came ; he had been 
wholly absent more than two years. 

He was superb to the sight still, with matchless splen- 
dor of face and form, but his carriage was more reckless 
and disordered than ever, and in his gemlike and night- 


60 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


black eyes, there was a look of cunning and of subtle 
ferocity new to them. 

His life had gone hardly with him, and to the indo- 
lence, the passions, the rapacity, the slothful sensuality 
of the gypsy — who had retained all the vices of his 
race whilst losing the virtues of simplicity in living, and 
of endurance under hardship — the gall of a sharp poverty 
had become unendurable; and to live without dice, and 
women, and wine, and boastful brawling, seemed to him 
to be worse than any death. 

The day he returned, they were still camped in the 
Liebana; in one of its narrow gorges, overhung with a 
thick growth of trees, and coursed through by a headlong 
hill-stream that spread itself into darkling breadths and 
leafy pools, in which the fish were astir under great snowy 
lilies and a tangled web of water-plants. 

He strode into the midst of them, as they sat round 
their camp-fire lit beneath a shelf of rock, as his wont 
was; and was welcomed, and fed, and plied with such 
as they had, with that mixture of sullen respect and in- 
curable attachment which his tribe preserved, through 
all their quarrels, for this, the finest and the fiercest, the 
most fickle and the most faithless, of them all. 

He gorged himself, and drank, and said little. 

When the meal was done, the young of the tribe scat- 
tered themselves in the red evening light under the great 
walnuts; some at feud, some at play. 

“Which is mine?” he asked, surveying the children. 
They showed her to him. The sequins were round her 
head ; she swung on a bough of ash ; the pool beneath 
mirrored her ; she was singing as children sing, without 
words, yet musically and gladly, catching at. the fireflies 
that danced above her in the leaves. 

“ Can she dance?” he asked lazily of them. 

“ In her own fashion, — as a flower in the wind,” Phra- 
tos answered him, with a smile ; and, willing to woo for 
her the good graces of her father, he slung his viol off his 
shoulders and tuned it, and beckoned the child. 

She came, knowing nothing who Taric was ; he 
was only to her a fierce-eyed man like the rest, who 
would beat her, most likely, if she stood between him 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


61 


and the sun, or overturned by mischance his horn of 
liquor. ^ 

Phratos played, and all the gypsy children, as their 
wont was, danced. 

But she danced all alone, and with a grace and a fire 
that surpassed theirs. She was only a baby still ; she had 
only her quick ear to guide her, and her only teacher 
was such inborn instinct as makes the birds sing and the 
young kids gambol. 

Yet she danced with a wondrous subtlety and inten- 
sity of ardor beyond her years; her small brown limbs 
glancing like bronze in the fire-glow, the sequins flashing 
in her flying hair, and her form flung high in air, like a 
bird on the wing, or a leaf on the wind ; never still, 
never ceasing to dart, and to leap, and to whirl, and to 
sway, yet always with a sweet dreamy indolence, even 
in her fiery unrest. 

Taric watched her under his bent brow until the 
music ceased, and she dropped on the grass spent and 
panting like a swallow after a long ocean flight. 

She will do,” he muttered. 

“ What is it you mean with the child ?” some women 
asked. 

Taric laughed. 

“ The little vermin is good for a gold piece or two,” he 
answered. 

Phratos said nothing, but he heard. 

After awhile the camp was still ; the gypsies slept. 
Two or three of their men went out to try and harry 
cattle by the light of the moon if they should be in luck; 
two others went forth to set snares for the wood par- 
tridges and rabbits ; the rest slumbered soundly, the 
dogs curled to a watching sleep of vigilant guard in their 
midst. 

Taric alone sat by the dying fire. When all was very 
quiet, and the stars were clear in midnight skies, the 
woman Zara stole out of her tent to him. 

“ You signed to me,” she said to him in a low voice. 

You want the child killed ?” 

Taric showed his white teeth like a wolf 

“Not I; what should I gain?” 

6 


62 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


“ What is it you want, then, with her 

‘‘ I mean to take her, that is all. See here — a month 
ago, on the other side of the mountains, I met a fantoccini 
player. It was at a wineshop, hard by Luzarches. He 
had a woman-child with him who danced to his music, 
and whom the people praised for her beauty, and who 
anticked like a dancing-dog, and who made a great deal 
of silver. We got friends, he and I. At the w'eek’s end 
the brat died : some sickness of the throat, they said. 
Her master tore his hair and raved ; the little wretch was 
worth handfuls of coin to him. For such another he 
would give twelve gold pieces. He shall have her. She 
will dance for him and me ; there is plenty to be made in 
that way. The women are fools over a handsome child ; 
they open their larders and their purses. I shall take her 
away before sunrise; he says he teaches them in seven 
days, by starving and giving the stick. She will dance 
while she is a child. Later on — there are the theaters ; 
she will be strong and handsome, and in the great cities, 
now, a woman’s comeliness is as a mine of gold ore. I 
shall take her away by sunrise.” 

“ To sell her ?” 

The hard fierce heart of ZaiA rebelled against him ; she 
had no tenderness save for her own offspring, and she had 
maltreated the stray child many a time; yet the proud 
liberty and the savage chastity of her race were roused 
against him by his words. 

Taric laughed again. 

“ Surely ; why not ? I will make a dancing-dog of her 
for the peasants’ pastime ; and in time she will make 
dancing-dogs of the nobles and the princes for her own 
sport. It is a brave life — none better.” 

The gypsy woman stood, astonished and irresolute. 
If he had flung his child in the river, or thrown her off 
a rock, ho would have less offended the instincts and pre- 
judices of her clan. 

“ What will Phratos say ?” she asked at length. 

“ Phratos ? A rotten fig for Phratos! What can he 
say — or do ? The little beast is mine; I can wring its 
neck if I choose, and if it refuse to pipe when we play for 
it, I will.” 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


63 


The woman sought in vain to dissuade him ; he was 
inflexible. She left him at last, telling h^self that it was 
no business of hers. He had a right to do what he chose 
with his own. So went and lay down among her 
brown-faced boys, and was indifferent, and slept. 

Taric likewise slept, upon a pile of moss under the 
ledge of the rock, lulled by the heat of the fire, which, ere 
lying down, he had fed with fresh boughs of resinous 
wood. 

When all was quite still, and his deep quiet breathing 
told that his slumber was one not easily broken, a man 
softly rose from the ground and threw off a mass of dead 
leaves that had covered him, and stood erect, a dark, 
strange, misshapen figure, in the moonlight; it was 
Phratos. 

He had heard, and understood all that Taric meant for 
the present and the future of the child ; and he knew that 
when Taric vowed to do a thing for his own gain, it were 
easier to uproot the chain of the Europa than to turn him 
aside from his purpose. 

It was my doing 1” said Phratos to himself bitterly, 
as he stood there, and his heart was sick and sore in him, 
as with self-reproach for a crime. 

He thought awhile, standing still in the hush of the 
midnight ; then he went softly, with a footfall that 
did not waken a dog, and lifted up the skins of Zara’s 
tent as they hung over the fir-poles. The moonbeams 
slanting through the foliage strayed in, and showed him 
the woman, sleeping among her rosy robust children, like 
a mastiff with her litter of tawny pups ; and away from 
them, on the bare ground closer to the entrance, the 
slumbering form of the young daughter of Taric. 

She woke as he touched her, opening bright bewildered 
eyes. 

“ Hush I it is I, Phratos,” he murmured over her, and 
the stifled cry died on her lips. 

He lifted her up in his arms and left the tent with her, 
and dropped the curtain of sheepskin, and went out into 
the clear, crisp, autumn night. Her eyes had closed 
again, and her head had sunk on his shoulder heavy with 
sleep ; she had not tried to keep awake one moment after 


64 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


knowing that it was Pbratos who had come for her ; she 
loved him, and m his hold feared nothing. 

Taric lay on the ledge of the rock, deaf with the torpor 
of a half-drunken slumber, dreaming gloomily ; his hand 
playing in his dreams with the knife that was thrust in 
his waistband. 

Phratos stepped gently past him, and through the out- 
stretched forms of the dogs and men, and across the died- 
out embers of the fire, over which the emptied soup-kettle 
still swung, as the night-breeze blew to and fro its chain. 
No one heard him. 

He went out from their circle and down the path of the 
gorge in silence, carrying the child. She was folded in a 
piece of sheepskin, and in her hair there were still the 
sequins. They glittered in the white light as he went; 
as the wind blew, it touched the chords of the viol on his 
shoulder, and struck a faint, musical, sighing sound from 
them. 

“ Is it morning the child murmured, half asleep. 

“ No, dear ; it is night,” he answered her, and she was 
content and slept again — the strings of the viol sending 
a soft whisper in her d’*C‘Wsy ear, each time that the 
breeze arose and swept across them. 

When the morning came it found him far on his road, 
leaving behind him the Liebana. 

There followed a bright month of autumn weather. 
The child was happy as she had never been. 

They moved on continually through the plains and the 
fields, the hills and the woods, the hamlets and the cities ; 
but she and the viol were never weary. They rode aloft 
whilst he toiled on. Yet neither was he weary, for the 
viol murmured in the wind, and the child laughed in the 
sunshine. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


65 


CHAPTER Y. 

It was late in the year. 

The earth and sky were a blaze of russet and purple, 
and scarlet and gold. The air was keen and swift, and 
strong like wine. A summer fragrance blended with a 
winter frost. The grape harvest had been gathered in, 
and had been plentiful, and the people were liberal and 
of good humor. 

Sometimes before a wineshop or beneath a balcony, or 
in a broad market-square at evening, Phratos played ; and 
the silver and copper coins were dropped fast to him. 
When he had enough by him to get a crust for himself, 
and milk and fruit for her, he did not pause to play, but 
moved on resolutely all the day, resting at night only, 

lie bought her a little garment of red foxes’ furs ; her 
head and her feet were bare. She bathed in clear running 
waters, and slept in a nest of hay. She saw vast towers, 
and wondrous spires, and strange piles of wood and stone, 
and rivers spanned by arches, and great forests half leaf- 
less, and plains red in stormy sunset light, and towns that 
lay hid in soft gold mists of vapor ; and saw all these as 
in a dream, herself borne high in air, wrapped warm in 
fur, and lulled by the sweet familiar fraternity of the old 
viol. She asked no questions, she was content, like a 
mole or a dormouse ; she was not beaten or mocked, 
she was never hungry nor cold ; no one cursed her, and 
she was with Phratos. 

It takes time to go on foot across a great country, and 
Phratos was nearly always on foot. 

Now and then he gave a coin or two, oi^ a tune or two, 
for a lift on some straw-laden wagon, or some mule-cart 
full of pottery or of vegetables, that was crawling on its 
slow way through the plains of the marshy lands, or the 
poplar-lined leagues of the public highways. But as 
a rule he plodded on by himself, shunning the people 
of his own race, and shunned in return by the ordinary 

G* 


66 


FOLLE-FARINE, 


populace of the places through which he traveled. For 
they knew him to be a Spanish gypsy by his skin and his 
garb and his language, and by the starry-eyed Arab-faced 
child who ran by his side in her red fur and her flashing 
sequins. 

“ There is a curse written against all honest folk on 
every one of those shaking coins,” the peasants muttered 
as she passed them. 

She did not comprehend their sayings, for she knew 
none but her gypsy tongue, and that only very imper- 
fectly ; but she knew by their glance that they meant 
that she was something evil ; and she gripped tighter 
Phratos’s hand — half terrified, half triumphant. 

The weather grew colder and the ground harder. The 
golden and scarlet glories of the south and of the west, 
their red leafage and purple flowers, gorgeous sunsets and 
leaping waters, gave place to the level pastures, pale skies, 
leafless woods, and dim gray tints of the northerly lands. 

The frosts became sharp, and mists that came from 
unseen seas enveloped them. There were marvelous old 
towns ; cathedral spires that arose, ethereal as vapor ; 
still dusky cities, aged with many centuries, that seemed 
to sleep eternally in the watery halo of the fog ; green 
cultivated hi I is, from whose smooth brows the earth- 
touching clouds seemed never to lift themselves ; straight 
sluggish streams, that flowed with leisurely laziness 
through broad flat meadow-lands, white with snow and 
obscure with vapor. These were for what they ex- 
changed the pomp of dying foliage, the glory of crimson 
fruits, the fierce rush of the mistral, the odors of the 
nowel-born violets, the fantastic shapes of the aloes and 
olives raising their dark spears and their silvery network 
against the amber fires of a winter dawn in the rich 
southwest. 

The child was chilled, oppressed, vaguely awestruck, 
and disquieted ; but she said nothing ; Phratos was 
there and the viol. 

She missed the red forests and the leaping torrents, 
and the prickly fruits, and the smell of the violets and 
the vineyards, and the wild shapes of the cactus, and the 
old myrtles that were hoary and contorted with age. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 67 

But she did not complain nor ask any questions; she 
had supreme faith in Phratos. 

One night, at the close of a black day in midwinter, the 
sharpest and hardest in cold that they had ever encoun- 
tered, they passed through a little town whose roadways 
were mostly canals, and whose spires and roofs and 
pinnacles and turrets and towers were all beautiful with 
the poetry and the majesty of a long-perished age. 

The day had been bitter ; there was snow every- 
where ; great blocks of ice choked up the water ; the 
belfry chimes rang shrilly through the rarefied air; the 
few folks that were astir were wrapped in wool or sheep- 
skin ; through the casements there glowed the ruddy 
flush of burning logs ; and the muffled watchmen pass- 
ing to and fro in antique custom on their rounds called 
out, under the closed houses, that it was eight of the 
night in a heavy snowstorm. 

Phratos paused in the town at an old hostelry to give 
the child a hot drink of milk and a roll of rye bread. 
There he asked the way to the wood and the mill of 
Ypres. 

They told it him sullenly and suspiciously : since for a 
wild gypsy of Spain the shrewd, thrifty, plain people 
of the north had no liking. 

He thanked them, and went on his way, out of the 
barriers of the little town along a road by the river to- 
wards the country. 

“Art thou cold, dear?” he asked her, with more 
tenderness than common in his voice. 

The child shivered under her little fur-skin, which 
would not keep out the searching of the hurricane and 
the driving of the snowflakes ; but she drew her breath 
quickly, and answered him, “No.” 

They came to a little wood, leafless and black in the 
gloomy night ; a dead crow swung in their faces on a 
swaying pear-tree; the roar of the mill-stream loudly 
filled what otherwise would have been an intense si- 
lence. 

He made his way in by a little wicket, through an 
orchard and through a garden, and so to the front of the 
mill-house. The shutters were not closed ; through the 


68 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


driving of the snow he could see within. It looked to 
him — a houseless wanderer from his youth up — strangely 
warm and safe and still. 

An old man sat on one side of the wide hearth ; an 
old woman, who span, on the other ; the spinning-wheel 
turned, the thread flew, the logs smoked and flamed, the 
red glow played on the blue and white tiles of the chim- 
ney-place, and danced on the pewter and brass on the 
shelves ; from the rafters there hung smoked meats and 
dried herbs and strings of onions ; there was a crucifix, 
and below it a little Nativity, in wax and carved wood. 

He could not tell that the goodly stores were only 
gathered there to be sold later at famine prices to a starv- 
ing peasantry; he could not tell that the wooden god 
was only worshiped in a blind, bigoted, brutal selfish- 
ness, that desired to save its own soul, and to leave all 
other souls in eternal damnation; 

He could not tell ; he only saw old age and warmth 
and comfort; and what the people who booted him as a 
heathen called the religion of Love. 

“ They will surely be good to her he thought. “ Old 
people, and prosperous, and alone by their fireside.” 

It seemed that they must be so. 

Anyway, there was no other means to save her from 
Taric. 

His heart was sore within him, for he had grown to 
love the child ; and to the vagrant instincts of bis race 
the life of the house and of the hearth seemed like the 
life of the cage for the bird. Yet Phratos, who was not 
altogether as his own people were, but had thought much 
and often in his own wild way, knew that such a life was 
the best for a woman-child, — and, above all, for a woman- 
child who had such a sire as Taric. 

To keep her with himself was impossible. He had 
always dwelt with his tribe, having no life apart from 
theirs; and even if he had left them, wherever he had 
wandered, there would Taric have followed, and found 
him, and claimed the child by his right of blood. There 
was no other way to secure her from present misery and 
future shame, save only this ; to place her with her 
mother’s people. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


69 


She stood beside him, still and silent, gazing through 
the snowflakes at the warmth of the mill-kitchen within. 

He stooped over her, and pushed between her fur gar- 
ment and her skin the letter he had found on the breast 
of the dead woman in the Liebana. 

“ Thou wilt go in there to the old man yonder, and 
sleep by that pleasant fire to-night,’’ he murmured to her. 
“ And thou wilt be good and gentle, and even as thou art 
to me always ; and to-morrow at noontide I will come 
and see how it fares with thee.” 

Her small hands tightened upon his. 

“ I will not go without thee,” she muttered in the broken 
tongue of the gypsy children. 

There were food and milk, fire and shelter, safety from 
the night and the storm there, she saw ; but these were 
naught to her without Phratos. She struggled against 
her fate as the young bird struggles against being thrust 
into the cage, — not knowing what captivity means, and 
yet afraid of it and rebelling by instinct. 

He took her up in his arms, and pressed her close to 
him, and for the first time kissed her. For Phratos, 
though tender to her, had no woman’s foolishness, but had 
taught her to be hardy and strong, and to look for neither 
caresses nor compassion — knowing well that to the love- 
child of Taric in her future years the first could only 
mean shame, and the last could only mean alms, which 
would be shame likewise. 

“Go, dear,” he said softly to her; and then he struck 
with his staflf on the wooden door, and, lifting its latch, 
unclosed it; and thrust the child forward, ere she could 
resist, into the darkness of the low entrance-place. 

Then he turned and went swiftly himself through the 
orchard and wood into the gloom and the storm of the 
night. 

He knew that to show himself to a northern house- 
holder were to do her evil and hurt; for between the 
wanderer of the Spanish forests and the peasant of the 
Norman pastures there could be only defiance, mistrust, 
and disdain. 

“ I will see how it is with her to-morrow,” he said to 
himself as he faced again the wind and the sleet. “ If it 


10 


FOLLE-FARINE, 


be well with her — let it be well. If not, she must come 
forth with me, and we must seek some lair where her wolf- 
sire shall not prowl and discover her. But it will be hard 
to find ; for the vengeance of Taric^ is swift of foot and 
has a far-stretching hand and eyes that are sleepless.” 

And his heart was heavy in him as he went. He had 
done what seemed to him just and due to the child and 
her mother ; he had been true to the vow ho had made 
answering the mute prayer of the sightless dead eyes ; 
he had saved the flesh of the child from the whip of the 
trainer, and the future of the child from the shame of the 
brothel ; he had done thus much in saving her from her 
father, and he had done it in the only way that was pos- 
sible to him. 

Yet his heart was heavy as he went ; and it seemed to 
him even as though he had thrust some mountain-bird 
with pinions that would cleave the clouds, ,and eyes that 
would seek the sun, and a song that would rise with the 
dawn, and a courage that would breast the thunder, down 
into the darkness of a trap, to be shorn and crippled and 
silenced for evermore. 

“ I will see her to-morrow,” he told himself ; restless 
with a vague remorse, as though the good he had done 
had been evil. 

But when the morrow dawned there had happened 
that to Phratos which forbade him'to see whether it were 
well with her that day or any day in all the many years 
that came. 

For Phratos that night, being blinded and shrouded in 
the storm of snow, lost such slender knowledge as he had 
of that northern country, and wandered far afield, not 
knowing where he was in the wide white desert, on 
which no single star-ray shone. 

The violence of the storm grew with the hours. The 
land was a sheet of snow. The plains were dim and 
trackless as a desert. Sheep were frozen in their folds, 
and cattle drowned amidst the ice in the darkness. All 
lights were out, and the warning peals of the bells were 
drowned in the .tempest of the winds. 

The land was strange to him, and he lost all knowl- 
edge where he was. Above, beneath, around, were the 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


tl 


dense white rolling clouds of snow. Now and then 
through the tumult of the hurricane there was blown a 
strange harsh burst of jangled chimes that wailed a mo- 
ment loudly on the silence and then died again. 

At many doors he knocked: the doors of little lonely 
places standing in the great colorless waste. 

But each door, being opened cautiously, was with 
haste shut in his face again. 

“ It is a gypsy,” the people muttered, and were afraid ; 
and they drew their bars closer and huddled together in 
their beds, and thanked their saints that they were safe 
beneath a roof. 

lie wrapped his sheepskin closer round him and set 
his face against the blast. 

A hundred times he strove to set his steps backwards 
to the town, and a hundred times he failed ; and mov^ed 
only round and round vainly, never escaping the maze of 
‘the endless white fields. 

Now the night was long, and he was weakly. 

In the midst of the fields there was a cross, and at the 
head of the cross hung a lantern. The wind tossed the 
light to and fro. It flickered on the head of a woman. 
She lay in the snow, and her hand grasped' his foot as 
he passed her. 

“I am dead,” she said to him; “dead of hunger. 
But the lad lives — save him.” 

And as she spoke, her lips closed together, her throat 
rattled, and she died. 

The boy slept at her feet, and babbled in his sleep, de- 
lirious. 

Phratos stooped down and raised him. He was a 
child of eight years, and worn with famine and fever, 
and his gaunt eyes stared hideously up at the driving- 
snow. 

Phratos folded him in his arms, and went on with him : 
the snow had nearly covered the body of his mother. 

All around were the fields. There was no light, ex- 
cept from the lantern on the cross. A few sheep huddled 
near without a shepherd. The stillness was intense. 
The bells had ceased to ring or he had wandered far from 
the sound of them. 


72 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


The lad was senseless; he muttered drearily foolish 
words of fever; his limbs hung in a dead weight; his 
teeth chattered. Phratos, bearing him, struggled on: 
the snow was deep and drifted heavily ; every now and 
then he stumbled and plunged to his knees in a rift of 
earth or in a shallow pool of ice. 

At last his strength, feeble at all times, failed him ; 
his arms could bear their burden no longer ; he let the 
young boy slip from his hold upon the ground; and 
stood, breathless and broken, with the snowflakes beating 
on him. 

“The woman trusted me,” he thought; she was a 
stranger, she was a beggar, she was dead. She had no 
bond upon him. Neither could she ever bear witness 
against him. Yet he was loyal to her. 

He unwound the sheepskin that he wore, and stripped 
himself of it and folded it about the sick child, and with 
a slow laborious eflbrt drew the little body away under 
the frail shelter of a knot of furze, and wrapped it 
closely round, and left it there. 

Jt was all that he could do. 

Then, with no defense between him and the driving 
cold, he strove once more to find his road. 

It was quite dark; quite still. 

The snow fell ceaselessly ; the white wide land was 
patchless as the sea. 

He stumbled on, as a mule may which being blind and 
bruised yet holds its way from the sheer instinct of its 
sad dumb patience, llis veins were frozen ; his beard 
was ice ; the wind cut his flesh like a scourge ; a sickly 
dreamy sleepiness stole on him. . 

He knew well what it meant. 

He tried to rouse himself; he was young, and his life 
had its sweetness ; and there were faces he would fain 
have seen again, and voices whose laughter he would 
fain have heard. 

He drew the viol round and touched its strings ; but 
his frozen fingers had lost their cunning, and the soul of 
the music was chilled and dumb: it only sighed in 
answer. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


IS 


He kissed it softly as he would have kissed a woman’s 
lips, and put it in his bosom. It had all his youth in it. 

Then he stumbled onward yet again, feebly, being a 
cripple, and cold to the bone, and pierced with a million 
thorns of pain. 

There was no light anywhere. 

The endless wilderness of the white plowed lands 
stretched all around him; where the little hamlets clus- 
tered the storm hid them ; no light could penetrate the 
denseness of that changeless gloom ; and the only sound 
that rose upon the ghastly silence was the moaning of 
some perishing flock locked in a flood of ice, and deserted 
by its shepherd. 

But what he saw and what he heard were not these 
going barefoot and blindfold to his death, the things of 
his own land were with him ; the golden glories of sun 
sets of paradise ; the scarlet blaze of a wilderness of 
flowers ; the sound of the fountains at midnight ; the 
glancing of the swift feet in the dances ; the sweetness 
of songs sad as death sung in the desolate courts of old 
palaces ; the deep dreamy hush of white moons shining 
through lines of palms straight on a silvery sea. 

These arose and drifted before him, and he ceased to 
suffer or to know, and sleep conquered him ; he dropped 
down on the white earth noiselessly and powerlessly as a 
leaf sinks ; the snow fell and covered him. 

When the morning broke, a peasant, going to his labor 
in the fields, while the stormy winter sun rose red over 
the whitened world, found both his body and the child’s. 

The boy was warm and living still beneath the shelter 
of the sheepskin : Phriitos was dead. 

The people succored the child, and nursed and fed him 
so that his life was saved ; but to Phratos they only gave 
such burial as the corby gives the stricken deer. 

“ It is only a gypsy ; let him lie,” they said ; and they 
left him there, and the snow kept him. 

His viol they robbed him of, and cast it as a plaything 
to their children. 

But the children could make no melody from its dumb 
strings. For the viol was faithful ; and its music was 
dead too. 


7 


FOLLE-FARTNE. 


Y4 


And his own land and his own people knew him never 
again ; and never again at evening was the voice of his 
viol heard in the stillness, and never again did the young 
men and maidens dance to his bidding, and the tears 
and the laughter rise and fall at his will, and the beasts 
and the birds frisk and sing at his coming, and the chil- 
dren in his footsteps cry, “ Lo, it is summer, since Pbratos 
is here ! ” 


k 


4 


BOOK II. 


, CHAPTER 1. 

The hottest suq of a hot summer shone on a straight 
white dusty road. 

An old man was breaking stones by the wayside ; he 
was very old, very bent, very lean, worn by nigh a hun- 
dred years if he had been worn by one; but he struck 
yet with a will, and the flints flew in a thousand pieces 
under his hammer, as though the youth and the force of 
nineteen years instead of ninety were at work on them. 

When the noon bell rang from a little odd straight 
steeple, with a slanting roof, that peered out of the trees 
to the westward, he laid his hammer aside, took oft’ his 
, brass-plated cap, wiped his forehead of its heat and dust, 
sat down on his pile of stones, took out a hard black crust 
and munched with teeth that were still strong and wiry. 

The noontide was very quiet ; the heat was intense, for 
there had been no rainfall for several weeks ; there was 
one lark singing high up in the air, with its little breast 
lifted to the sun ; but all the other birds were mute and in- 
visible, doubtless hidden safely in some delicious shadow, 
swinging drowsily on tufts of linden bloom, or under- 
neath the roofing of broad chestnut leaves. 

The road on either side was lined by the straight forms 
of endless poplars, standing side by side in sentinel. The 
fields were all ablaze around on every side with the gold 
of ripening corn or mustard, and the scarlet flame of in- 
numerable poppies. 

Here and tiiere they were broken by some little house, 
white or black, or painted in bright colors, which lifted 
up among its leaves a little tower like a sugar-loaf, or a 

( 75 ) 


76 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


black gable, and a pointed arch beneath it. Now and 
then they were divided by rows of trees standing breath- 
less in the heat, or breadths of apple orchards, some with 
fruits ruby red, some with fruits as yet green as their 
foliage. 

Through it all the river ran, silver in the light, with shal- 
low fords, where the deep-flanked bullocks drank ; and 
ever and anon an ancient picturesque bridge of wood, 
time-bronzed and moss-imbedded. 

The old man did not look round once ; he had been on 
these roads a score of years; the place. had to him the 
monotony and colorlessness which all long familiar scenes 
wear to the eyes that are weary of them. 

He was ninety-five; he had to labor for his living; he 
ate black bread ; he had no living kith or kin ; no friend 
save in the mighty legion of the dead ; he sat in the 
scorch of the sun ; he hated the earth and the sky, the 
air and the landscape: why not f 

They had no loveliness for him ; he only knew that the 
flies stung him, and that the red ants could crawl through 
the holes in his shoes, and bite him sharply with their 
little piercing teeth. 

He sat in such scanty shade as the tall lean poplar 
gave, munching his hard crusts ; he had a fine keen pro- 
file and a long white beard that were cut as sharply as 
an intaglio against the golden sunlight, in which the 
gnats were dancing. His eyes were fastened on the dust 
as he ate ; blue piercing eyes which had still something 
of the fire of their youth ; and his lips under the white 
hair moved a little now and then, half audibly. 

His thoughts were with the long dead years of an un- 
forgotten time — a time that will be remembered as long 
as the earth shall circle round the sun. 

With the present he had nothing to do ; he worked to 
satisfy the lingering cravings of a body that age seemed 
to have lost all power to kill ; he worked because he was 
too much of a man still to beg, and because suicide looked 
to his fancy like a weakness. But life for all that was 
over with him ; life in the years of his boyhood had been 
a thing so splendid, so terrible, so drunken, so divine, so 
tragic, so intense, that the world seemed now to him to 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


71 


have grown pale and gray and pulseless, with no sap in 
its vines, no hue in its suns, no blood in its humanity. 

For his memory held the days of Thermidor ; the weejcs 
of the White Terror; the winter dawn, when the drums 
rolled out a King’s threnody; the summer nights, when 
all the throats of Paris cried “ Marengo I” 

He had lived in the wondrous awe of that abundant 
time when every hour was an agony or a victory, when 
every woman was a martyr or a bacchanal ; when the 
same scythe that had sevmred the flowering grasses, 
served also to cleave the fair breasts of the mother, the 
tender throat of the child ; when the ground was purple 
with the blue blood of men as with the juices of out- 
trodden gi’iipes, and when the waters were white with the 
bodies of virgins as with the moon-fed lilies of summer. 
And now he sat here by the wayside in the dust and the 
sun, only feeling the sting of the fly and the bite of the 
ant ; and the world seemed dead to him, because so long 
ago, though his body still lived on, his soul had cursed 
God and died. 

Through the golden motes of the dancing air and of 
the quivering sunbeams, whilst high above the lark sang 
on, there came along the road a girl. 

She was bare-footed, and bare-throated, lithe of move- 
ment, and straight and supple as one who passed her life 
on the open lands and was abroad in all changes of the 
weather. She walked with the free and fearless measure 
of the countrywomen of Rome or the desert-born women 
of Nubia; she had barely completed her sixteenth year, 
but her bosom and limbs were full and linn, and moulded 
with almost all the luxuriant splendor of maturity ; her 
head was not covered after the fashion of the country, but 
had a scarlet kerchief wound about. On it she bore a flat 
basket, filled high with fruits and herbs and flowers ; a 
mass of color and of blossom, through which her dark 
level brows and her great eyes, blue-black as a tempestuous 
night, looked out, set straight against the sun. 

She came on, treading down the dust with her long and 
slender feet, that were such feet as a sculptor would give 
to his Cleopatra or his Phryne. Her face was grave, 
shadowed, even fierce ; and her mouth, though scarlet as 

7 * 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


T8 

a berry and full and curled, had its lips pressed close on 
one another, like the lips of one who has long kept silence, 
and may keep it — until death. 

As she saw the old man her eyes changed and lightened 
with a smile which for the moment banished all the gloom 
and savage patience from her eyes, and made them mel- 
low and lustrous as a southern sun. 

She paused before him, and spoke, showing her beau- 
tiful white teeth, small and even, like rows of cowry 
shells. 

“ You are well, Marcellin 

The old man started, and looked up with a certain 
gladness on his own keen visage, which had lost all ex- 
pression save such as an intense and absorbed. retrospec- 
tion will lend. 

“ Fool I” he made answer, harshly yet not unkindly. 
“When will you know that so long as an old man lives 
so long it cannot be ‘ well ’ with him 

“ Need one be a man, or old, to answer so 

She spoke in the accent and the language of the prov- 
ince, but with a voice rich and pure and cold ; not the 
voice of the north, or of any peasantry. 

She put her basket down from off her head, and leaned 
against the trunk of the poplar beside him, crossing her 
arms upon her bare chest. 

“ To the young everything is possible ; to the old 
nothing,” he said curtly. 

Her eyes gleamed with a thirsty longing ; she made 
him no reply. 

He broke off half his dry bread and tendered it to her. 
She shook her head and motioned it away ; yet she was 
as sharp-hungered as any hawk that has hunted all 
through the night and the woods, and has killed nothing. 
The growing life, the superb strength, the lofty stature of 
her made her need constant nourishment, as young trees 
need it ; and she was fed as scantily as a blind beggar’s 
dog, and less willingly than a galley-slave. 

The kindly air had fed her richly, strongly, continually ; 
that was all. 

“ Possible I” she said slowly, after awhile. “ What is 
‘possible’? I do not understand.” 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


^9 


The old man, Marcellin, smiled grimly. 

“ You see that lark ? It soars there, and sings there. 
It is possible that a fowler may hide in the grasses ; it is 
possible that it may be shot as it sings ; it is possible that 
it may have the honor to die in agony, to grace a rich 
man’s table. You see?” 

She mused a moment; her brain was rapid in intuitive 
perception, but barren of all culture ; it took her many 
moments to follow the filmy track of a metaphorical 
utterance. 

• But by degrees she saw his meaning, and the shadow 
settled over her face again. 

“The ‘possible,’ then, is only — the worse?” she said 
slowly. 

The old man smiled still grimly. 

“Nay; our friends the priests say there is a ‘possible’ 
which will give — one day — the fowler who kills the lark 
the wings of the lark, and the lark’s power to sing Laus 
Deo in heaven. 1 do not say — they do.” 

“ The priests I” All the scorn of which her curved lips 
were capable curled on them, and a deep hate gathered in 
her eyes — a hate that was unfathomable and mute. 

“Then there is no ‘possible’ for me,” she said bitterly, 
“if so be that priests hold the gifts of it ?” 

Marcellin looked up at her from under his bushy white 
eyebrows ; a glance fleet and keen as the gleam of blue 
steel. 

“ Yes, there is,” he said curtly. “ You are a woman- 
child, and have beauty : the devil will give you one.” 

“ Always the devil I” she muttered. There was im- 
patience in her echo of the words, and yet there was an 
awe also as of one who uses a name that is mighty and 
full of majesty, although familiar. 

“Always the devil 1” repeated Marcellin. “For the 
world is always of men.” 

His meaning this time lay too deep for her, and passed 
her ; she stood leaning against the poplar, with her head 
bent and her form motionless and golden in the sunlight 
like a statue of bronze. 

“ If men be devils they are my brethren,” she said sud- 
denly ; “why do they, then, so hate me?” 


80 


FOLLE-FAEINE. 


The old man stroked his beard. 

“ Because Fraternity is Hate. Cain said so ; but God 
would not believe him.” 

She mused over the saying; silent still. 

The lark dropped down from heaven, suddenly falling 
through the air, mute. It had been struck by a sparrow- 
hawk, which flashed back against the azure of the skies 
and the white haze of the atmosphere ; and which flew 
down in the track of the lark, and seized it' ere it 
gained the shelter of the grass, and bore it away within 
his talons. 

Marcellin pointed to it with his pipe-stem. 

‘‘ You see, there are many forms of the ‘possible’ ” 

“ When it means Death,” she added. 

The old man took his pipe back and smoked. 

“ Of course. Death is the key-note of creation.” 

Again she did not comprehend ; a puzzled pain clouded 
the luster of her eyes. 

“ But the lark praised God — why should it be so dealt 
with ?” 

Marcellin smiled grimly. 

“ Abel was praising God ; but that did not turn aside 
the steel.” 

She was silent yet again; he had told her that old 
story of the sons born of Eve, and the one whom, hearing 
it, she had understood and pitied had been Cain. 

At that moment, through the roadway that wound 
across the meadows and through the corn lands and the 
trees, there came in sight a gleam of scarlet that was not 
from the poppies, a flash of silver that was not from the 
river, a column of smoke that was not from the weeds 
that burned on the hillside. 

There came a moving cloud, with a melodious murmur 
softly rising from it ; a cloud that moved between the 
high flowering hedges, the tall amber wheat, the slender 
poplars, and the fruitful orchards ; a cloud that grew larger 
and clearer as it drew more near to them, and left the green 
water-meadows and the winding field-paths for the irreat 
highroad. 

It was a procession of the Church. 

It drew closer and closer by slow imperceptible degrees, 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


81 


until it approached them ; the old man sat upright, not 
taking his cap from his head nor his pipe from his mouth ; 
the young girl ceased to lean for rest against the tree, and 
stood with her arms crossed on her breast. 

The Church passed them ; the gilt crucifix held aloft, the 
scarlet and the white of the floating robes catching the 
sunlight ; the silver chains and the silver censers gleam- 
ing, the fresh young voices of the singing children cleav- 
ing the air like a rush of wind; the dark shorn faces 
of the priests bowed over open books, the tender sound 
of little bells ringing across the low deep monotony of 
prayer. 

The Church passed them ; the dust of the parched 
road rose up in a choking mass ; the heavy mist of 
the incense hung darkly on the sunlit air ; the tramp of 
the many feet startled the birds from their rest, and 
pierced through the noonday silence. 

It passed them, and left them behind it ; but the fresh 
leaves were choked and whitened ; the birds were fluttered 
and affrightened ; the old man coughed, the girl strove 
to brush the dust motes from her smarting eyelids. 

“ That is the Church I” said the stone-breaker, with a 
smile. “ Dust — terror — a choked voice — and blinded 
eyes.” 

Now she understood ; and her beautiful curled lips 
laughed mutely. 

The old man rammed some more tobacco into the bowl 
of his pipe. 

“ That is the Church I” he said. “ To burn incense 
and pray for rain,, and to fell the forests that were the 
rain-makers.” 

The procession passed away out of sight, going along 
the highway and winding by the course of the river, 
calling to the bright blue heavens for rain ; whilst the 
little bells rang and the incense curled and the priests 
prayed themselves hoarse, and the peasants toiled foot- 
s(^e, and the eager steps of the choral children trod the 
tiny gnat dead in the grasses and the bright butterfly 
dead in the dust. 

The priests had cast a severer look from out their 
down-dropped eyelids ; the children had huddled together, 


82 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


with their voices faltering a little ; and the boy choristers 
liad shot out their lips in gestures of defiance and oppro- 
brium as they had passed these twain beneath the way- 
side trees. For the two were both outcasts. 

“ Didst thou see the man that killed the king?” whis- 
pered to another one fair and curly-headed baby, who was 
holding in the sun her little, white, silver-fringed banner, 
and catching the rise and fall of the sonorous chant as 
well as she could with her little lisping tones. 

Didst thou see the daughter of the devil ?” muttered 
to another a handsome golden-brown boy, who had left 
his herd untended in the meadow to don his scarlet robes 
and to swing about the censer of bis village chapel. 

And they all sang louder, and tossed more incense on 
high, and marched more closely together under the rays 
of the gleaming crucifix as they went; feeling that they 
had been beneath the shadow of the powers of darkness, 
and that they were purer and holier, and more exalted, 
because they had thus passed by in scorn what was 
accursed with psalms on their lips, with the cross as their 
symbol. 

So they went their way through the peaceful country 
with a glory of sunbeams about them — through the corn, 
past the orchards, by the river, into the heart of the old 
brown quiet town, and about the foot of the great cathe- 
dral, where they kneeled down in the dust and prayed, 
then rose and sang the ‘‘ Angelus.” 

Then the tall dark-visaged priest, who had led them 
all thither under the standard of the golden crucifix, lifted 
his voice alone and implored God, and exhorted man ; 
implored for rain and all the blessings of harvest, ex- 
horted to patience and the imitation of God. 

The people were moved and saddened, and listened, 
smiting their breasts ; and after awhile rising from their 
knees, many of them in tears, dispersed and went their 
ways: muttering to one another: — “We have had no 
such harvests as those of old since the man that slew a 
saint came to dwell here and answering to one An- 
other: — “We had never such droughts as these in the 
sweet cool weather of old, before the offspring of hell 
was among us.” 


FOLLE-FARTNE. 


83 


For the priests had not said to them, “ Lo, your 
mercy is parched as the earth, and your hearts as the 
heavens are brazen.’^ 


CHAPTER II. 

In the days of his youngest youth, in the old drunken 
days that were dead, this stone-breaker Marcellin had 
known such life as it is given to few men to know — a life 
of the soul and the senses ; a life of storm and delight ; a 
life mad with blood and with wine; a life of divinest 
dreams ; a life when women kissed them, and bid them 
slay ; a life when mothers blessed them and bade them 
die ; a life, strong, awful, splendid, unutterable ; a life 
seized at its fullest and fiercest and fairest, out of au 
air that was death, off an earth that was hell. 

When his cheeks had had a boy’s bloom and his curls 
a boy’s gold, he had seen a nation in delirium ; he had 
been one of the elect of a people ; he had uttered the 
words that burn, and wrought the acts that live ; he had 
been of the Thousand of Marsala ; and he had been of 
the avengers of Thermidor; he had raised bis flutelike 
voice from the tribune, and he had cast in his vote for 
the death of a king ; passions had been his playthings, 
and he had toyed with life as a child with a match ; he 
had beheld the despised enthroned in power, and desola- 
tion left within king’s palaces ; he, too, had been fierce, 
and glad, and cruel, and gay, and drunken, and proud, as 
the whole land was ; he had seen the white beauty of 
princely women bare in the hands of the mob, and the 
throats that princes had caressed kissed by the broad 
steel knife ; he had had his youth in a wondrous time, 
when all men had been gods or devils, and all women 
, martyrs or furies. 

And now, — be broke stones to get daily bread, and 
those who passed him by cursed him, saying, — 

“ This man slew a king.” 

For he had outlived his time, and the life that had been 


84 


FOLLE-FARTNE. 


golden and red at its dawn was now gray and pale as 
the ashes of a fire grown cold ; for in all the list of the 
world’s weary errors there is no mistake so deadly as age. 

Years before, in such hot summer weather as this 
against which the Church had prayed, the old man, going 
homewards to his cabin amidst the fields, had met a little 
child coming straight towards him in the full crimson 
glow of the setting sun, and with the flame of the poppies 
all around her. He hardly knew why he looked at her ; 
but when he had once looked his eyes rested there. 

She had the hues of his youth about her; in that 
blood-red light, among the blood-red flowers, she made 
him think of women’s forms that he had seen in all their 
grace and their voluptuous loveliness clothed in the red 
garment of death, and standing on the dusky red of the 
scaffold, as the burning mornings of the summers of 
slaughter had risen over the land. 

The child was all alone before him in that intense glow 
as of fire ; above her there was a tawny sky, flushed 
here and there with purple; around her stretched the 
solitary level of the fields burnt yellow as gold by the long 
months of beat. There were stripes on her shoulders, 
blue and black from the marks of a thong. 

He looked at her, and stopped her, why he hardly knew, 
except that a look about her, beaten but yet unsubdued, 
attracted him. He had seen the same look in the years 
of his youth, on the faces of the nobles he hated. 

“ Have you been hurt ?” he asked her in his harsh 
strong voice. She put her heavy load of fagots down 
and stared at him. 

“Hurt?” She echoed the word stupidly. No one 
ever thought she could be hurt ; what was done to her 
was punishment and justice. 

“ Yes. Those stripes — they must be painful ?” 

She gave a gesture of assent with her head, but she 
did not answer. 

“Who beat you?” he pursued. 

A cloud of passion swept over her bent face. 

“ Flamma.” 

“You were wicked?” 

“ They said so.” 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


85 


“ And what do you do when you are beaten 

“ I shut my mouth.” 

For what 

“ For fear they should know it hurt me — and be glad.” 

Marcellin leaned on his elm stick, and fastened on her 
his keen, passionless eyes with a look that, for him who 
was shamed and was shunned by all his kind, was almost 
sympathy. 

“ Come to my hut,” he said to her. “ I know a herb 
that will take the fret and the ache out of your bruises.” 

The child followed him passively, half stupidly; he 
was the first creature that had ever bidden her go with 
him, and this rough pity of his was sweet to her, with an 
amazing incredible balm in it that only those can know 
who see raised against them every man’s hand, and hear 
on their ears the mockery of all the voices of their world. 
Under reviling and contempt and constant rejection, she 
had become savage as a trapped hawk, wild as an escaped 
panther ; but to him she was obedient and passive, be- 
cause he had spoken to her without a taunt and without 
a curse, which until now had been the sole two forms of 
human speech she had heard. His little hut was in the 
midst of those spreading cornfields, set where two path- 
ways crossed each other, and stretched down the gentle 
slope of the cultured lands to join the great highway — a 
hut of stones and plaited rushes, with a roof of thatch, 
where the old republican, hardy of frame and born of a 
toiling race, dwelt in solitude, and broke his scanty bitter 
bread without lament, if without content. 

He took some leaves of a simple herb that he knew, 
soaked them with water, and bound them on her shoul- 
ders, not ungainly, though his hand was so rough with 
labor, and, as men said, had been so often red with car- 
nage. Then he gave her a draught of goat’s milk, sweet 
and fresh, from a wooden bowl ; shared with her the dry 
black crusts that formed his only evening meal ; bestowed 
on her a gift of a rare old scarlet scarf of woven wools 
and Eastern broideries, one of the few relics of his buried 
life ; lifted the fagots on her back, so that she could 
carry them with greater ease ; and set her on her home- 
ward way. 


8 


86 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


Come to me again,” he said, briefly, as she went 
across the threshold. The child bent her head in silence, 
and kissed his hand quickly and timidly, like a grateful 
dog that is amazed to have a caress, and not a blow. 

“ After a forty years’ vow 1 have broken it ; I have 
pitied a human thing,” the old man muttered as lie stood 
in his doorway looking after her shadow as it passed 
small and dark across the scarlet light of the poppies. 

“ They call him vile, and they say that he slew men,” 
thought the child, who had long known his face, though 
he never had noted hers ; and it seemed to her that all 
mercy lay in her father’s kingdom — which they called the 
kingdom of evil. The cool moist herbs soaked on her 
bruises ; and the draught of milk had slaked the thirst of 
her throat. 

“Is evil good?” she asked in her heart as she went 
through the tall red poppies. 

And from that evening thenceforward Folle-Farine and 
Marcellin cleaved to one another, being outcasts from all 
others. 


CHAPTER HI. 

As the religious gathering broke up and split in divers 
streams to wander divers ways, the little town returned 
to its accustomed stillness — a stillness that seemed to 
have in it the calm of a thousand sleeping years, and the 
legends and the dreams of half a score of old dead cen- 
turies. 

On market-days and saint-days, days of high feast or 
of perpetual chaffering, the town was full of color, move- 
ment, noise, and population. The country people crowded 
in, filling it with the jingling of mule-bells ; the fisher 
people came, bringing in with them the crisp salt smell 
of the sea and the blue of the sea on their garments ; its 
own tanners and ivory carvers, and fruiterers, and lace- 
makers turned out by the hundred in all the quaint 
variety of costumes that their forefathers had bequeathed 


FOLLE-FARINE. SI 

to them, and to which they were still wise enough to 
adhere. 

But at other times, when the fishers were in their 
hamlets, and the peasantry on their lands and in their 
orchards, and the townsfolk at their labors in the old 
rich renaissance mansions which they had turned into 
tanneries, and granaries, and wool-sheds, and workshops, 
the place was profoundly still; scarcely a child at play in 
the streets, scarcely a dog asleep in the sun. 

When the crowds had gone, the priests laid aside their 
vestments, and donned the black serge of their daily 
habit, and went to their daily avocations in their humble 
dwellings. The crosses and the censers were put back 
upon their altars, and hung up upon their pillars. The 
boy choristers and the little children put their white linen 
and their scarlet robes back in cupboards and presses, 
with heads of lavender and sprigs of rosemary to keep 
the moth and the devil away, and went to their fields, to 
their homes, to their herds, to their paper kites, to their 
daisy chains, to the poor rabbits they pent in a hutch, to 
the poor Hies they killed in the sun. 

The streets became quite still, the market-place quite 
empty ; the drowsy silence of a burning, cloudless after- 
noon was over all the quiet places about the cathedral 
walls, where of old the bishops and the canons dwelt; 
gray shady courts ; dim open cloisters ; houses covered 
with oaken carvings, and shadowed with the spreading 
branches of chestnuts and of lime-trees that were as aged 
as themselves. 

Under the shelter of one of the lindens, after the popu- 
lace had gone, there was seated on a broad stone bench 
the girl who had stood by the wayside erect and unbend- 
ing as the procession had moved before her. 

She had flung herself down in dreamy restfulness. 
She had delivered her burden of vegetables and fruit at a 
shop near by, whose awning stretched out into the street 
like a toadstool yellow with the sun. 

The heat was intense; she had been on foot all day; 
she sat to rest a moment, and put her burning hands 
under a little rill of water that spouted into a basin in a 
niche in the wall — an ancient well, with a stone image 


88 


FOLLEFARINE. 


sculptured above, and a wreath of vine-leaves in stone 
running around, in the lavish ornamentation of an age 
when men loved loveliness for its own sake, and be- 
grudged neither time nor labor in its service. 

She leaned over the fountain, kept cool bj the roofing 
of the thick green leaves ; there was a metal cup attached 
to the basin by a chain, she filled it at the running thread 
of water, and stooped her lips to it again and again 
thirstily. 

The day was sultry; the ways were long and white 
with powdered limestone ; her throat was still parched 
with the dust raised by the many feet of the multitude ; 
and although she had borne in the great basket which 
now stood empty at her side, cherries, peaches, mulber- 
ries, melons, full of juice and lusciousness, this daughter 
of the devil had not taken even one to freshen her dry 
mouth. 

Folle-Farine stooped to the water, and played with it, 
and drank it, and steeped her lips and her arms in it ; 
lying there on the stone bench, with her bare feet curled 
one in another, and her slender round limbs full of the 
voluptuous repose of a resting panther. 

The coolness, the murmur, the clearness, the peace, the 
soft flowing movement of water, possess an ineffable charm 
for natures that are passion-tossed, feverish, and full of 
storm. 

There was a dreamy peace about the place, too, which 
had charms likewise for her, in the dusky arch of the long 
cloisters, in the lichen-grown walls, in the broad pam- 
ments of the paven court, in the clusters of delicate carv- 
ings beneath and below ; in the sculptured frieze where 
little nests that the birds had made in the spring still 
rested ; in the dense brooding thickness of the boughs 
that brought the sweetness and the shadows of the woods 
into the heart of the peopled town. 

She stayed there, loath to move ; loath to return where 
a jeer, a bruise, a lifted stick, a muttered curse, were all 
her greeting and her guerdon. 

As she lay thus, one of the doors in the old houses in 
the cloisters opened; the head of an old woman was 
thrust out, crowned with the high, fan-shaped comb, and 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


89 


the towering white linen cap that are the female note of 
that especial town. 

The woman was the mother of the sacristan, and she, 
looking out, shrieked shrilly to her son, — 

Georges, Georges ! come hither. The deviPs daughter 
is drinking the blest water!’’ 

The sacristan was hoeing among his cabbages in the 
little garden behind his house, surrounded with dipt yew, 
and damp from the deep shade of the cathedral, that over- 
shadowed it. 

lie ran out at his mother’s call, hoe in hand, himself an 
old man, though stout and strong. 

The well in the wall was his especial charge and pride ; 
immeasurable sanctity attached to it. 

According to tradition, the water had spouted from the 
stone itself, at the touch of a branch of blossoming pear, 
held in the hand of St. Jerome, who had returned to earth 
in the middle of the fourteenth century, and dwelt for 
awhile near the cathedral, working at the honorable trade 
of a cordwainer, and accomplishing mighty miracles 
throughout the district. 

It was said that some of his miraculous power still re- 
mained in the fountain, and that even yet, those who 
drank on St. Jerome’s day in full faith and with believing 
hearts, were, oftentimes, cleansed of sin, and purified of 
bodily disease. Wherefore on that day, throngs of peas- 
antry flocked in from all sides, and crowded round it, and 
drank ; to the benefit of the sacristan in charge, if not to 
that of their souls and bodies. 

Summoned by his mother, he flew to the rescue of the 
sanctified spring. 

“ Get you gone !” he shouted. “ Get you gone, you 
child of hell I How durst you touch the blessed basin ? 
Do you think that God struck water from the stone for 
such as you ?” 

Folle-Farine lifted her head and looked him in the face 
with her audacious eyes and laughed ; then tossed her 
head again and plunged it into the bright living water, 
till her lips, and her cheeks, and all the rippling hair about 
her temples sparkled with its silvery drops. 

8 * 


90 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


The sacristan, infuriated at once by the impiety and the 
defiance, shrieked aloud : 

“ Insolent animal ! Daughter of Satan I I will teach 
you to taint the gift of God with lips of the devil I” 

And he seized her roughly with one hand upon her 
shoulder, and with the other raised the hoe and bran- 
dished the wooden staff of it above her head in threat to 
strike her ; whilst his old mother, still thrusting her lofty 
headgear and her wrinkled face from out the door, 
screamed to him to show he was a man, and have no 
mercy. 

As his grasp touched her, and the staff cast its shadow 
across her, Folle-Farine sprang up, defiance and fury 
breathing from all her beautiful fierce face. 

She seized the staff in her right hand, wrenched it with 
a swift movement from its hold, and, catching his head 
under her left arm, rained blows on him from his own 
weapon, with a sudden gust of breathless rage which 
blinded him, and lent to her slender muscular limbs the 
strength and the force of man. 

Then, as rapidly as she had seized and struck him, she 
flung him from her with such violence that he fell pros- 
trate on the pavement of the court, caught up the metal 
pail which stood by ready filled, dashed the water over 
him where he lay, and, turning from him without a word, 
walked across the courtyard, slowly, and with a haughty 
grace in all the carriage of her bare limbs and the folds 
of her ragged garments, bearing the empty osier basket 
on her head, deaf as the stones around her to the screams 
of the sacristan and his mother. 

In these secluded cloisters, and in the high noontide, 
when all were sleeping or eating in the cool shelter of 
their darkened houses, the old woman’s voice remained 
unheard. 

The saints heard, no doubt, but they were too lazy to 
stir from their niches in that sultry noontide, and, except 
the baying of a chained dog aroused, there was no answer 
to the outcry ; and Folle-Farine passed out into the market- 
place unarrested, and not meeting another living creature. 
As she turned into one of the squares leading to the open 
country, she saw in the distance one of the guardians of 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


91 


the peace of the town, moving quickly towards the clois- 
ters, with his glittering lace shining in the sun and his 
long scabbard clattering upon the stones. 

She laughed a little as she saw. 

“ They will not come after me,” she said to herself. 

“ They are too afraid of the devil.” 

She judged rightly ; they did not come. 

She crossed all the wide scorching square, whose 
white stones blazed in the glare of the sun. There was 
nothing in sight except a stray cat prowling in a corner, 
and three sparrows quarreling over a foul-smelling heap 
of refuse. / 

The quaint old houses round seemed all asleep, with 
the shutters closed like eyelids over their little, dim, aged 
orbs of windows. 

The gilded vanes on their twisted chimneys and carved 
parapets pointed motionless to the warm south. There 
was not a sound, except the cawing of some rooks that 
built their nests high aloft in the fretted pinnacles of the 
cathedral. 

Undisturbed she crossed the square and took her way 
down the crooked streets that led her homeward to the 
outlying country. It was an old, twisted, dusky place, 
with the water flowing through its center as its only 
roadway; and in it there were the oldest houses of the 
town, all of timber, black with age, and carved with the 
wonderful florid fancies and grotesque conceits of the 
years when a house was to its master a thing beloved 
and beautiful, a bulwark, an altar, a heritage, an heir- 
loom, to be dwelt in all the days of a long life, and be- 
queathed in all honor and honesty to a noble offspring. 

The street was very silent, the ripple of the water was 
the chief sound that filled it. Its tenants were very poor, 
and in many of its antique mansions the beggars shared 
shelter with the rats and the owls. 

In one of these dwellings, however, there were still 
some warmth and color. 

The orange and scarlet flowers of a nasturtium curled 
up its twisted pilasters ; the big, fair clusters of hydrangea, 
filled up its narrow casements ; a breadth of many-colored 
saxafrage, with leaves of green and rose, and blossoms of 


92 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


purple and white, hung over the balcony rail, which five 
centuries earlier had been draped with cloth of gold ; and 
a little yellow song-bird made music in the empty niche 
from which the sculptured flower-de-luce had been so long 
torn down. 

From that window a woman looked down, leaning with 
folded arms above the rose-tipped saxafrage, and beneath 
the green-leaved vine. 

She was a fair woman, white as the lilies, she had 
silver pins in her amber hair, and a mouth that laughed 
sweetly. She called to Folle-Farine, — 

“ You brown thing; why do you stare at me 

Folle-Farine started and withdrew the fixed gaze of 
her lustrous eyes. 

“ Because you are beautiful,” she answered curtly. 
All beautiful things had a fascination for her. 

This woman above was very fair to see, and the girl 
looked at her as she looked at the purple butterflies in the 
sun ; at the stars shining down through the leaves ; at 
the vast, dim, gorgeous figures in the cathedral windows ; 
at the happy children running to their mothers with their 
hands full of primroses, as she saw them in the woods at 
springtime; at the laughing groups round the wood-fires 
in the new year time when she passed a lattice pane that 
the snowdrift had not blocked; at all the things that 
were so often in her sight, and yet with which her life 
had no part or likeness. 

She stood there on the rough flints, in the darkness 
cast from the jutting beams of the house ; and the other 
happier creature leaned above in the light, white and 
rose-hued, and with the silver bells of the pins shaking 
iu her yellow tresses. 

“You are old Flamma’s granddaughter,” cried the 
other, from her leafy nest above. “ You work for him all 
day long at the mill ?” 

“ Yes.” 

“ And your feet are bare, and your clothes are rags, 
and you go to and fro like a packhorse, and the people 
hate you? You must be a fool. Your father was the 
devil, they say : why do you not make him give you 
good things ?” 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


93 


“ He will not hear,” the child muttered wearily. Had 
she not besought him endlessly with breathless prayer ? 

“ Will he not ? Wait a year — wait a year.” 

“ What then ?” asked Folle-Farine, with a quick startled 
breath. 

In a year you will be a woman, and he always hears 
women, they say.” 

“ He hears you.” 

The fair woman above laughed: 

“ Perhaps ; in his fashion. But he pays me ill as yet.” 

And she plucked one of the silver pins from her hair, 
and stabbed the rosy foam of the saxafrage through and 
through with it; for she was but a gardener’s wife, and 
was restless and full of discontent. 

“ Get you gone,” she added quickly, or I will 
throw a stone at you, you witch ; you have the evil 
eye, they say, and you may strike me blind if you 
stare so.” 

Folle-Farine went on her way over the sharp stones 
with a heavy heart. That picture in the casement had 
made that passage bright to her many a time ; and when 
at last the picture had moved and spoken, it had only 
mocked her and reviled her as the rest did. 

The street was dark for her like all the others now. 

The gardener’s wife, leaning there, with the green and 
gold of the vineleaves brushing her hair, looked after her 
down the crooked way. 

“ That young wretch will be more beautiful than I,” 
she thought ; and the thought was bitter to her, as such 
a one is to a fair woman. 

Folle-Farine went slowly and sadly through the street, 
with her head dropped, and the large osier basket trailing 
behind her over the stones. 

She was well used to be pelted with words hard as 
hailstones, and usually heeded them little, or gave them 
back with sullen defiance. But from this woman they 
had wounded her ; from that bright bower of golden 
leaves and scarlet flowers she had faintly fancied some 
stray beam of light might wander even to her. 

She was soon outside the gates of the town, and 
beyond the old walls, where the bramble and the lichen 


94 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


grew over the huge stones of ramparts and fortifications, 
useless and decayed from age. 

The country roads and lanes, the silver streams and 
the wooden bridges, the lanes through which the market 
mules picked their careful way, the fields in which the 
white-capped peasant women, and the brindled oxen were 
at work, stretched all before her in a radiant air, sweet 
with the scent of ripening fruits from many orchards. 

Here and there a wayside Calvary rose dark against 
the sun ; here and there a chapel bell sounded from under 
some little peaked red roof. The cattle dozed beside 
meadow ditches that were choked with wild flowers ; the 
dogs lay down beside their sheep and slept. 

At the first cottage which she passed, the housewife 
sat out under a spreading chestnut-tree, weaving lace 
upon her knee. 

Folle-Farine looked wistfully at the woman, who was 
young and pretty, and who darted her swift skilled hand 
in and out and around the bobbins, keeping time mean- 
while with a mirthful burden that she sang. 

The woman looked up and frowned as the girl passed 
by her. 

A little way farther on there was a winehouse by the 
roadside, built of wood, vine-wreathed, and half hidden in 
the tall flowering briers of its garden. 

Out of the lattice there was leaning a maiden with the 
silver cross on her bosom shining in the sun, and her 
meek blue eyes smiling down from under the tower of her 
high white cap. She was reaching a carnation to a stu- 
dent who stood below, with long fair locks and ruddy 
cheeks, and a beard yellow with the amber down of twenty 
years ; and who kissed her white wrist as he caught the 
red flower. 

Folle-Farine glanced at the pretty picture with a dull 
wonder and a nameless pain : what could it mean to be 
happy like that ? 

Half a league onward she passed another cottage 
shadowed by a sycamore-tree, and with the swallows 
whirling around its tall twisted stone chimneys, and a 
beurre pear covering with branch and bloom its old gray 
walls. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


95 


An aged woman sat sipping coffee in the suq, and a 
young one was sweeping the blue and white tiles with a 
broom, singing gayly as she swept. 

“ A rt thou well placed, my mother she asked, pausing 
to look tenderly at the withered brown face, on which the 
shadows of the sycamore leaves were playing. 

The old mother smiled, steeping her bread in the coffee- 
bowl. 

“ Surely, child ; I can feel the sun and hear you sing.’^ 

She was happy though she was blind. 

Folle-Farine stood a moment and looked at them across 
a hedge of honeysuckle. 

“ How odd it must feel to have any one to care to hear 
3^our voice like that !” she thought ; and she went on her 
wa3" through the poppies and the corn, half softened, half 
enraged. 

Was she lower than they because she could find no 
one to care for her or take gladness in her life ? Or was 
she greater than they because all human delights were to 
her as the dead letters of an unknown tongue ? 

Down a pathway fronting her that ran midway between 
the yellowing seas of wheat and a belt of lilac clover, 
over which a swarm of bees was murmuring, there came 
a countrywoman, crushing the herbage under her heavy 
shoes, ragged, [licturesque, sunbrowned, swinging deep 
brass pails as she went to the herds on the hillside. 

She carried a child twisted into the folds of her 
dress; a boy, half asleep, with his curly head against her 
breast. As she passed, the woman drew her kerchief 
over her bosom and over the brown rosy face of the 
child. 

‘‘ She shall not look at thee, my darling,’^ she muttered. 
“Her look withered Remy’s little limb.” 

And she covered the child jealously, and turned aside, 
so that she should tread a separate pathway through the 
clover, and did not brush the garments of the one she 
was compelled to pass. 

Folle-Farine heard, and laughed aloud. 

She knew of what the woman was thinking. 

In the summer of the previous year, as she had passed 
the tanyard on the western bank of the river, the tanner’s 


96 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


little son, rushing out in haste, had curled his mouth in 
insult at her, and clapping his hands, hissed in a child’s 
love of cruelty the mocking words which he had heard 
his elders use of her. In answer, she had only turned 
her head and looked down at him with calm eyes of 
scorn; 

But the child, running out fast, and* startled by that 
regard, had stepped upon a shred of leather and had 
fallen heavily, breaking his left leg at the knee. The 
limb, unskillfully dealt with, and enfeebled by a tendency 
to dis.ease, had never been restored, but hung limp, 
crooked, useless, withered from below the kuee. 

Through all the country side the little cripple, B^iny, 
creeping out into the sun upon his crutches, was pointed 
out in a passionate pity as the object of her sorcery, the 
victim of her vengeance. When she had heard what 
they said she had laughed as she laughed now, drawing 
together her straight brows and showing her glistening 
teeth. 

All the momentary softness died in her as the peasant 
covered the boy’s face and turned aside into the clover. 
She laughed aloud and swept on through the half-ripe 
corn with that swift, harmonious, majestic movement 
which was inborn in her, as it is inborn in the deer or 
the antelope, singing again as she went those strange 
wild airs, like the sigh of the wind, which were all the 
language that lingered in her memory from the laud that 
had seen her birth. 

To such aversion as this she was too well used for it 
to be a matter of even notice to her. She knew that she 
was marked and shunned by the community amidst which 
her lot was cast; and she accepted proscription without 
wonder and without resistance. 

Folle-Farine: the Dust. What lower thing did earth 
hold ? 

In this old-world district, amidst the pastures and corn- 
lands of Normandy, superstition had taken a hold which 
the passage of centuries and the advent of revolution had 
done very little to lessen. 

Few of the people could read and fewer still could 
write. They knew nothing but what their priests and 


FOLLE-FARINE, 


9T 


their politicians told them to believe. They went to their 
beds with the poultry, arid rose as the cock crew : they 
went to mass, as theii* ducks to the osier and weed ponds ; 
and to the conscription as their lambs to the slaughter. 
They understood that there was .a world beyond them, 
but they remembered it only as the best market for their 
fruit, their fowls, their lace, their skins 

Their brains were as dim as were their oil-lit streets 
at night; tiiough their lives were content and mirthful, 
and the most part pious. They went out into the sum- 
mer meadows chanting aves, in seasons of drought to 
pray for rain on their parching orchards, in the same 
credulity witli which they groped through the winter 
fog, bearing torches and chanting dirges to gain a bless- 
ing at seed-time on their bleak black fallows. 

The beauty and the faith of the old Mediaeval life were 
with them still ; and with its beauty and its faith were 
its bigotry and its cruelty likewise. They led simple and 
contented lives; for the most part honest, and among 
themselves cheerful and kindly; preserving much grace 
of color, of costume, of idiosyncrasy, because apart from 
the hueless communism and characterless monotony of 
modern cities. 

But they believed in sorcery and in devilry; they were 
brutal to their beasts, and could be as brutal to their foes ; 
they were steeped in legend and tradition from their 
cradles; and all the darkest superstitions of dead ages 
still found home and treasury in their hearts and at their 
hearths. 

Therefore, believing her a creature of evil, they were 
inexorable against her, and thought that in being so they 
did their duty. 

They had always been a religious people in this birth 
country of the pFamma race; the strong poetic venera- 
tion of their forefathers, which had symbolized itself in 
the carving of every lintel, corbel, or buttress in their 
streets, and in the fashion of every spire on which a 
weather-vane could gleam against their suns, was still in 
their blood ;*the poetry had departed, but the bigotry re- 
mained. 

Their ancestors had burned wizards and witches by the 

9 


98 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


score in the open square of the cathedral place, and their 
grandsires and grandams had in brave, dumb, ignorant 
peasant fashion held fast to the lily and the cross, and 
gone by hundreds to the salutation of the axe and the 
baptism of the sword in the red days of revolution. 

They were the same people still : industrious, frugal, 
peaceful, loyal, wedded to old ways and to old relics, 
content on little, and se\ene of heart ; yet, withal, where 
they feared or where they hated, brutal with the brutality 
begotten of abject ignorance. And they had been so to 
this outcast whom they all called Folle-Farine. 

When she had first come amidst them, a little desolate 
foreign child, mute with the dumbness of an unknown 
tongue, and cast adrift among strange people, unfamiliar 
ways, and chill blank glances, she had shyly tried in a 
child’s vague instincts of appeal and trust to make friends 
with the other children that she saw, and to share a little 
in the mothers’ smiles and the babies’ pastimes that were 
all. around her in the glad green world of summer. 

But she had been denied and rejected with hard words 
and harder blows ; at her coming the smiles had changed 
to frowns, and the pastime into terror. She was proud, 
she was shy, she was savage ; she felt rather than under- 
stood that she was suspected and reviled ; she ceased to 
seek her own kind, and only went for companionship and 
sympathy to the creatures of the fields and the woods, to 
the things of the earth and the sky and the water. 

“ Thou art the devil’s daughter !” half in sport hissed 
the youths in the market-place against her as the little 
child went among them, carrying a load for her grand- 
sire heavier than her arms knew how to bear. 

“ Thou wert plague-spotted from thy birth,” said the 
old man himself, as she strained her small limbs to and 
fro the floors of his storehouses, carrying wood or flour 
or tiles or rushes, or whatever there chanced to need such 
convoy. 

“ Get thee away, we are not to touch thee I” hissed the 
six-year-old infants at play by the river when she waded 
in amidst them to reach with her lither arm the far-olf 
water-flowers they were too timorous to pluck, and tender 
it to the one who had desired it. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


99 


“ The devil begot thee, and my cow fell ill yesternight 
after thou hadst laid hands on her I” muttered the old 
women, lifting a stick as she went near to their cattle in 
the meadows to brush olf with a broad dockleaf the flies 
that were teasing the poor, meek, patient beasts. 

So, cursed when she did her duty, and driven away 
when she tried to do good, her young soul had hardened 
itself and grown fierce, mute, callous, isolated. 

There were only the four-footed things, so wise, so 
silent, so tender of heart, so bruised of body, so innocent, 
and so agonized, that had compassion for her, and saved 
her from utter desolation. In the mild sad gaze of the 
cow, in the lustrous suffering eyes of the horse, in the 
noble frank faith of the dog, in the soft-bounding glee of 
the lamb, in the unwearied toil of the ass, in the tender 
industry of the bird, she had sympathy and she had 
example. 

She loved them and they loved her. She saw that they 
were sinless, diligent, faithful, devoted, loyal servers of 
base masters ; loving greatly, and for their love goaded, 
beaten, overtasked, slaughtered. 

She took the lesson to heart ; and hated men and 
women with a bitter hatred. 

So she had grown up for ten years, caring for no human 
thing, except in a manner for the old man Marcellin, who 
was, like her, proscribed. 

The priests had striven to turn her soul what they had 
termed heavenward ; but their weapons had been wrath 
and intimidation. She would have none of them. No 
efforts that they or her grandsire made had availed ; she 
would be starved, thrashed, cursed, maltreated as they 
would ; she could not understand their meaning, or would 
not submit herself to their religion. 

As years went on they had found the contest hopeless, 
so had abandoned her to the devil, who had made her ; 
and the daughter of one whom the whole province had 
called saint had never passed within church-doors or 
known the touch of holy water save when they had cast 
it on her as an exorcism. And when she met a priest 
in the open roads or on the bypaths of the fields, she 
always sang in loud defiance her wildest melodies. 


100 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


Where had she learnt these ? 

They had been sung to her by Phratos, and taught by 
him. 

Who had he been ? 

Her old life was obscure to her memory, and yet 
glorious even in its dimness. 

She did not know who those people had been with 
whom she had wandered, nor in what land they had 
dwelt. But that wondrous free life remained on her re- 
membrance as a thing never to be forgotten or to be 
known again; a life odorous with bursting fruits and 
budding tiowers; full of strangest and of sweetest music; 
spent forever under green leaves and suns that had no 
setting; forever beside fathomless waters and winding 
forests ; forever rhymed to melody and soothed to the 
measure of deep winds and drifting clouds. 

For she had forgotten all except its liberty and its love- 
liness ; and the old gypsy life of the Liebana remained 
with her only as some stray fragment of an existence 
passed in another world from which she w^as now an 
exile, and revived in her only in the fierce passion of her 
nature, in her bitter, vague rebellion, in her longing to be 
free, in her anguish of vain desires for richer hues and 
bluer skies and wilder winds than those amidst w^hich she 
toiled. At times she remembered likewise the songs and 
the melodies of Phratos ; remembered them when the 
moon rays swept across the white breadth of water-lilies, 
or the breath of spring stole through the awakening 
woods ; and when she remembered them she wept — 
wept bitterly, where none could look on her. 

She nevc^* thought of Phratos as a man ; as of one who 
had lived in a human form and was now dead in an 
earthly grave; her memory of him was of some nameless 
creature, half divine, whoso footsteps brought laughter 
and music, with eyes bright as a bird’s, yet sad as a dog's, 
and a voice forever singing ; clad in goat’s hair, and 
gigantic and gay ; a creature that had spoken tenderl3’’to 
her, that had bidden her laugh and rejoice, that had 
carried her when she w’as w^eary ; that had taught her to 
sleep under the dewy leaves, and to greet the things of 
the night as soft sisters, and to fear nothing in the whole 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


101 


living world, in the earth, or the air, or the sky, and to 
tell the truth though a falsehood were to spare the bare 
feet flintstones, and naked shoulders the stick, and an 
empty body hunger and thirst. A creature that seemed 
to her in her memories even as the faun seemed to the 
fancies of the children of the Piraeus ; a creature half man 
and half animal, glad and grotesque, full of mirth and of 
music, belonging to the forest, to the brook, to the stars, 
to the leaves, wandering like the wind, and, like the wind, 
homeless. 

This was all her memory; but she cherished it; in 
the face of the priests she bent her straight black brows 
and curled her scornful scarlet lips, but for the sake of 
Phratos she held one religion ; though she hated men 
she told them never a lie, and asked them never an 
alms. 

She went now along the white level roads, the empty 
basket balanced on her head, her form moving with the 
free harmonious grace of desert women, and she sang as 
she went the old sweet songs of the broken viol. 

She was friendless and desolate ; she was ill fed, she 
was heavily tasked ; she toiled without thanks ; she was 
ignorant of even so much knowledge as the peasants 
about her had ; she was without a past or a future, and 
her present had in it but daily toil and bitter words ; 
hunger, and thirst, and chastisement. 

Yet for all that she sang ; — sang because the vitality 
in her made her dauntless of all evil ; because the abun- 
dant life opening in her made her glad in despite of fate ; 
because the youth, and the strength, and the soul that 
were in her could not utterly be brutalized, could not 
wholly cease from feeling the gladness of the sun, the 
coursing of the breeze, the liberty of nature, the sweet 
quick sense of living. 

Before long she reached the spot where the old man 
Marcollin was breaking stones. 

His pile was raised much higher ; he sat astride on a 
log of timber and hammered the flints on and on, on and 
on, without looking up ; the dust was still thick on the 
leaves and the herbage where the tramp of the people 
had raised it ; and the prayers and the chants had failed 

9 * 


102 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


as yet to bring one slightest cloud, one faintest rain mist 
across the hot unbroken azure of the skies. 

Marcellin was her only friend; the proscribed always 
adhere to one another ; when they are few they can only 
brood and suffer, harmlessly ; when they are many they 
rise as with one foot and strike as with one hand. There- 
fore, it is always perilous to make the lists of any pro- 
scription overlong. 

The child, who was also an outcast, went to him and 
paused ; in a curious, lifeless bitter way they cared for 
one another; this girl who had grown to believe herself 
born of hell, and this man who had grown to believe that 
he had served hell. 

With the bastard Folle-Farine and with the regicide 
Marcellin the people had no association, and for them no 
pity ; therefore they had found each other by the kinship 
of proscription ; and in a way there was love between 
them. 

“ You are glad, since you sing!” said the old man to 
her, as she passed him again on her homeward way, and 
paused again beside him. 

“ The birds in cage sing,” she answered him. “ But, 
think you they are glad V' 

“ Are they not ?” 

She sat down a moment beside him, on the bank which 
was soft with moss, and odorous with wild flowers curl- 
ing up the stems of the poplars and straying over into 
the corn beyond. 

“ Are*they?- Look. Yesterday I passed a cottage, it 
is on the great south road ; far away from here. The 
house was empty ; the people, no doubt, were gone to 
labor in the fields'; there was a wicker cage hanging to 
the wall, and in the cage there was a blackbird. The 
sun beat on his head; his square of sod was a drv clod 
of bare earth ; the heat had dried every drop of water in 
his pan ; and yet the bird was singing. Singing how ? 
In torment, beating his breast against the bars till the 
blood started, crying to the skies to have mercy on him 
and to let rain fall. His song was shrill ; it had a scream 
in it ; still be sang. Do you say the merle was glad ?” 

“ What did you do ?” asked the old man, still break- 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


103 


ing the stones with a monotonous rise and fall of his 
hammer. 

“ 1 took the cage down and opened the door.” 

“And he?” 

“ lie shot up in the air first, then dropped down amidst 
the grasses, where a little brook which the drought had 
not dried, was still running ; and he bathed and drank 
and bathed again, seeming mad with the joy of the water. 
When I lost him from sight he was swaying on a bough 
among the leaves over the river ; but then he was silent I” 

“ And what do you mean by that ?” 

Her eyes clouded ; she was mute. She vaguely knew 
the meaning it bore to herself, but it was beyond her to 
express it. 

All things of nature had voices and parables for her, 
because her fancy was vivid and her mind was dreamy; 
but that mind was still too dark, and too profoundly igno- 
rant, for her to be able to shape her thoughts into meta- 
phor or deduction. 

The bird had spoken to her ; by his silence as by his 
song; but what he had uttered she could not well utter 
again. Save, indeed, that song was not gladness, and 
neither was silence pain. 

Marcellin, although he had asked her, had asked need- 
lessly ; for he also knew. 

“And what, think you, the people said, when they 
went back and found the cage empty ?” he pursued, still 
echoing his words and hers by the ringing sound of the 
falling hammer. • 

A smile curled her lips. 

y “That was no thought of mine,” she said carelessly. 
“ They had done wickedly to cage him ; to set him free I 
would have pulled down their thatch, or stove in their 
door, had need been.” 

“ Good I” said the old man briefly, with a gleam of 
light over his harsh lean face. 

He looked up at her as he worked, the shivered flints 
flying right and left. 

“ It was a pity to make you a woman,” he muttered, 
as his keen gaze swept over her. 

“ A woman I” She echoed the words dully and half 


104 


FOLLE-FARINE, 


wonderingly ; she could not understand it in connection 
with herself. 

A woman ; that was a woman who sat in the sun 
under the fig-tree, working her lace on a frame ; that was 
a wmaian who leaned out of her lattice tossing a red car- 
nation to her lover; that was a woman who swept the 
open porch of her house, singing as she cleared the dust 
away ; that was a woman who strode on her blithe way 
through the clover, carrying her child at her breast. 

She seemed to have no likeness to them, no kindred 
with them ; she a beast of burden, a creature soulless 
and homeless, an animal made to fetch and carry, to be 
cursed and beaten, to know neither love nor hope, neither 
past nor future, but only a certain dull patience and 
furious hate, a certain dim pleasure in labor and indiffer- 
ence to pain. 

“It was a pity to make you a woman,” said the old 
man once more. “You might be a man worth something ; 
but a woman ! — a thing that has no medium ; no haven 
between hell and heaven ; no option save to sit by the 
hearth to watch the pot boil and suckle the children, or 
to go out into the streets and the taverns to mock at men 
and to murder them. Which will you do in the future 

“ What 

She scarcely knew the meaning of the word. She saw 
the female creatures round her were of all shades of age, 
from the young girls with their peachlike cheeks to the 
old crones brown and withered as last year’s nuts ; she 
knew that if she lived on she would be old likewise ; but 
of a future she had no conception, no ideal. She had 
been left too ignorant to have visions of any other world 
hereafter than this one which the low lying green hills 
and the arc of the pale blue sky shut in upon her. 

She had one desire, indeed — a desire vague but yet 
fierce — the desire for liberty. But it was such desire as 
the bird which she had freed had known ; the desire of 
instinct, the desire of existence only ; her mind was 
powerless to conceive a future, because a future is a 
hope, and of hope she knew nothing. 

The old man glanced at her, and saw that she had not 
comprehended, lie smiled with a certain bitter pity. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


105 


“I spoke idly,” he said to himself; “slaves cannot 
have a future. But yet ” 

Yet he saw that the creature who was so ij^norant of 
her own powers, of her own splendors, of her own 
possibilities, had even now a beauty as great as that of a 
lustrous Eastern-eyed passion-flower; and he knew that 
to a woman who has such beauty as this the world holds 
out in its hand the tender of at least one future — one 
election, one kingdom, one destiny. 

“Women are loved,” she said, suddenly; “will any ^ 
one love me ?” 

Marcellin smiled bitterly. 

“ Many will love you, doubtless — as the wasp loves 
the peach that he kisses with his sting, and leaves rotten 
to drop from the stem !” 

She was silent again, revolving his meaning; it lay 
beyond her, both in the peril which it embodied from 
others, and the beauty in herself which it implied. She 
could reach no conception of herself, save as what she 
now was, a body-servant of toil, a beast of burden like 
a young mule. 

“But all shun me, as even the wasp shuns the bitter 
oak apple,” she said, slowly and dreamily; “ who should 
love me, even as the wasp loves the peach ?” 

Marcellin smiled his grim and shadowy smile. He 
made answer, — 

“Wait!” 

She sat mute once more, revolving this strange, brief 
word in her thoughts — strange to her, with a promise 
as vague, as splendid, and as incomprehensible as the 
prophecy of empire to a slave. 

“The future?” she said, at last. “That means some- 
thing that one has not, and that is to come — is it so?” 

“ Something that one never has, and that never come.s,” 
muttered the old man, wearily cracking the flints in two; 
“something that one possesses in one’s sleep, and that is 
farther off each time that one awakes; and yet a thing 
that one sees always — sees even when one lies a-dying, 
they say — for men are fools ” 

Folle-Farine listened, musing, with her hands clasped 
on the handle of her empty basket, and her chin resting 


106 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


upon them, and her eyes watching a maimed butterfly 
drag its wings of emerald and diamond through the hot, 
pale, sickly dust. 

“ I dream !” she said, suddenly, as she stooped and 
lifted the wounded insect gently on to the edge of a leaf. 
“ But I dream wide awake.” 

Marcellin smiled. 

“Never say so. They will think you mad. That is 
only what foolish things, called poets, do.” 

“ What is a poet ?” 

“ A foolish thing, I tell you — mad enough to believe 
that men will care to strain their eyes, as he strains his, 
to see the face of a God who never looks and never 
listens.” 

“Ah!” 

She was so accustomed to be told that all she did 
was unlike to others, and was either wicked or was 
senseless, that she saw nothing except the simple state- 
ment of a fact in the rebuke which he had given her. 
She sat quiet, gazing down into the thick white dust of 
the road, bestirred by the many feet of mules and men 
that had trodden through it since the dawn. 

“ I dream beautiful things,” she pursued, slowly. “ In 
the moonlight most often. I seem to remember, when I 
dream — so much I so much 1” 

“ Remember — what should you remember ? You were 
but a baby when they brought you hither.” 

“ So they say. But I might live before, in my father’s 
kingdom — in the devil’s kingdom. Why not?” 

Why not, indeed 1 Perhaps we all lived there once ; 
and that is why we all through all our lives hanker to 
get back to it. 

“ I ask him so often to take me back, but he does not 
seem ever to hear.” 

“ Chut I He will hear in his own good time. The 
devil never passes by a woman.” 

“ A woman I” she repeated. The word seemed to have 
no likeness and no fitness with herself. 

A woman I — she ! — a creature made to be beaten, and 
sworn at, and shunned, and loaded like a mule, and 
driven like a bullock 1 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


107 


‘‘ Look you,” said the old man, resting his hammer for 
a moment, and wiping the sweat from his brow, “ I 
have lived in this vile place forty years. I remember the 
woman that they say bore you — Reine Elamma. She 
was a beautiful woman, and pure as snow, and noble, and 
innocent. She wearied God incessantly. I have seen 
her stretched for hours at the foot of that cross. She was 
wretched ; and she entreated her God to take away her 
monotonous misery, and to give her some life new and 
fair. But God never answered. He left her to herself. 
It was the devil that heard — and replied.” 

“Then, is the devil juster than their God?” 

Marcellin leaned his hammer on his knees and his voice 
rose clear and strong as it had done of yore from the 
Tribune. 

“ He looks so, at the least. It is his wisdom, and that 
is why his following is so large. Nay, 1 say, when God 
is deaf the devil listens. That is his wisdom, see you. 
So often the poor little weak human soul, striving to find 
the right way, cries feebly for help, and none answer. 
The poor little weak soul is blind and astray in the busy 
streets of the world. It lifts its voice, but its voice is so 
young and so feeble, like the pipe of a newly-born bird in 
the dawn, that it is drowned in the shouts and the mani- 
fold sounds of those hard, crowded, cruel streets, where 
every one is for himself, and no man has ears for his 
neighbor. It is hungered, it is athirst, it is sorrowful, it 
is blinded, it is perplexed, it is afraid. It cries often, but 
God and man leave it to itself. Then the devil, who 
harkens always, and who, though all the trumpets blow- 
ing their brazen music in the streets bray in his honor, 
yet is too wise to lose even the slightest sound of any in 
distress — since of such are the largest sheaves of his 
harvest — comes to the little soul, and teaches it with ten- 
derness, and guides it towards the paths of gladness, and 
fills its lips with the bread of sweet passions, and its nos- 
trils with the savor of fair vanities, and blows in its ear 
the empty breath of men’s lungs, till that sickly wind 
seems divinest music. Then is the little soul dazzled 
and captured, and made the devil’s for evermore ; half 
through its innocence, half through its weakness; but 


108 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


chiefly of all because God and man would not hear its 
cries whilst yet it was sinless and only astray.” 

He ceased, and the strokes of his hammer rang again 
on the sharp flint stones. 

She had listened with her lips parted breathlessly, and 
her nightlike eyes dilated. 

In tlie far distant time, when he had been amidst the 
world of men, he had known how to utter the words that 
burned, and charm to stillness a raging multitude. He 
had not altogether lost this power, at such rare times 
as he still cared to break his silence, and to unfold the 
unforgotten memories of a life long dead. He would 
speak thus to her, but to no other. 

Folle^Farine listened, mute and breathless, her great 
eyes uplifted to the sun, where it was sinking westward 
through a pomp of golden and of purple cloud. He was 
the only creature who ever spoke to her as though she 
likewise were human, and she followed his words with 
dumb unquestioning faith, as a dog its master’s foot- 
steps. 

“ The soul ! What is the soul ?” she muttered, at 
length. 

He caught in his hand the beautiful diamond-winged 
butterfly, which now, freed of the dust and drinking in 
the sunlight, was poised on a foxglove in the hedge near 
him, and held it against the light. 

“ What is it that moves this creature’s wings, and 
glances in its eyes, and gives it delight in the summer’s 
warmth, in the orchid’s honey, and in the lime-tree’s 
leaves? I do not know ; but 1 know that I can kill it — 
with one grind of my heel. So much we know of the 
soul — no more.” 

She freed it from his hand. 

“ Whoever made it, then, was cruel. If he could give 
it so much power, why not have given it a little more, so 
that it could escape you always?” 

“ You ask what men have asked ten times ten thou- 
sand years — since the world began — without an answer. 
Because the law of all creation is cruelty, I suppose; 
because the dust of death is always the breath of life! 
The great man, dead, changes to a million worms, ^and 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


109 


lives again in the juices of the grass above his grave. 
It matters little. The worms destroy ; the grasses nourish. 
Few great men do more than the first, or do as much as 
the last.’’ 

“But get you homeward,” he continued, breaking off 
his parable; “it is two hours past noon, and if you be 
late on the way you pay for it with your body. Begone.” 

She nodded her head, and went; he seldom used gentle 
words to her, and yet she knew, in a vagne way, that he 
cared for her ; moreover, she rejoiced in that bitter, caustic 
contempt in which he, the oldest man amidst them, held 
all men. 

II is words were the only thing that had aroused her 
dulled brain to its natural faculties; in a manner, from 
him she had caught something of knowledge — some- 
thing, too, of intellect; he alone prevented her from 
sinking to that absolute unquestioning despair which 
surely ends in idiocy or in self-murder. 

She pursued her way in silence across the fields, and 
along the straight white road, and across a wooden bridge 
that spanned the river, to her home. 

There was a gentler luster in her eyes, and her mouth 
had the faint light of a half smile upon it; she did not 
know what hope meant; it never seemed possible to her 
that her fate could be other than it was, since so long the 
messengers and emissaries of her father’s empire had been 
silent and leaden-footed to her call. 

Yet, in a manner, she was comforted, for had not two 
mouths that day bidden her “wait”? 

She entered at length the little wood of Ypres, and 
heard that rush and music of the deep mill water which 
was the sole thing she had learned to love in all the 
place. 

Beyond it were the apple orchards and fruit gardens 
which rendered Claudis Flamma back full recompense 
for all the toil they cost him — recompense so large, in- 
deed, that many disbelieved in that poverty which he 
was wont to aver weighed so hardly and so lightly on 
him. Both were now rich in all their maturer abundance, 
since the stream which rushed through them had saved 

10 


110 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


them from the evil effects of the long drought so severely 
felt in all other districts. 

The cherry-trees were scarlet with their latest fruit ; 
the great pumpkins glowed among their leaves in tawny 
orange heaps ; little russet-breasted bullfinches beat their 
wings vainly at the fine network that enshrouded the 
paler gold of the wall apricots ; a gray cat was stealing 
among the delicate yellows of the pear-shaped marrows ; 
where a round green wrinkled melon la}’’ a-ripening in the 
sun, a gorgeous dragon-fly was hovering, and a mother- 
mavis, in her simple coif of brown and white and gray, 
was singing with all the gladness of her sunny summer 
joys. 

Beyond a hedge of prickly thorn the narrower flower- 
garden stretched, spanned by low stone walls, made 
venerable by the silvery beards of lichens ; and the 
earth was full of color from the crimson and the golden 
gladioli; from the carmine-hued carnations; from the 
deep-blue lupins, and the Gloire de Dijon roses ; from the 
green slender stems and the pure white cups of the vir- 
ginal lilies; and from the gorgeous beetles, with their purple 
tunics and their shields of bronze, like Grecian hoplites 
drawn in battle array. While everywhere, above this 
sweet glad garden world, the butterflies, purple and 
jeweled, the redstarts in their ruby dress, the dainty 
azure-winged and blue warblers, the golden-girdled wasp 
with his pinions light as mist, and the velvet-coated bee 
with his pleasant harvest song, flew ever in the sunlight, 
murmuring, poising, praising, rejoicing. 

The place was beautiful in its own simple, quiet way ; 
lying in a hollow, where the river tumbled down in two 
or three short breaks and leaps which broke its habitual 
smooth and sluggish form, and brought it in a sheet of 
dark water and with a million foam-bells against the 
walls of the mill-house and under the ponderous wheels. 

The wooden house itself also was picturesque in the 
old fashion when men builded their dwellings slowly and 
for love; common with all its countless carvings black by 
age, its jutting beams shapen into grotesque human like- 
ness and tragic masks ; its parquetted work run over by 
the green cups of stoneworts, and its high roof with deep 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


Ill 


shelving eaves bright with' diapered tiles of blue and 
white and rose, and alive all day with curling swallows, 
with pluming pigeons, with cooing doves. 

It was beautiful; and the heart of Heine Flamma’s 
young daughter doubtless would have clung to it with 
all a child’s instinct of love and loyalty to its home had 
it not been to her only a prison-house wherein three bit- 
ter jailers forever ruled her with a rod of iron — bigotry 
and penury and cruelty. 

She flung herself down a moment in the garden, on the 
long grass under a mulberry-tree, ere she went in to give 
her account of the fruit sold and the moneys brought by 
her. 

She had been on foot since four o’clock in the dawn of 
that sultry day ; her only meal had been a bowl of cold 
milk and a hunch of dry bread crushed in her strong 
small teeth. She had toiled hard at such bodily labor as 
was set to her ; to domestic work, to the work of the 
distalf and spindle, of the stove and the needle, they had. 
never been able to break her ; they had found that she 
would be beaten black and blue ere she would be bound 
to it; but against open air exertion she had never re- 
belled, and she had in her all the strength and the swift- 
ness of the nomadic race of the Liebana, and had not 
their indolence and their dishonesty. 

She was very hungry, she was again thirsty ; yet she 
did not break off a fruit from any bough about her ; she 
did not steep her hot lips in any one of the cool juicy 
apricots which studded the stones of the wall beyond her. 

No one had ever taught her honesty, except indeed in 
that dim dead time when Phratos had closed her small 
hands in his whenever they had stretched out to some 
forbidden thing, and had said, “ Take the goods the gods 
give thee, but steal not from men.” And yet honest she 
was, by reason of the fierce proud savage independence 
in her," and her dim memories of that sole friend loved 
and lost. 

She wanted many a thing, many a time — nay, nearly 
every hour that she lived, she wanted those sheer neces- 
saries which make life endurable ; but she had taught 
herself to do without them rather than owe them, by 


112 


FOLLE-FARINE 


prayer or by plunder, to that human race which she bated, 
and to which she always doubted her own kinship. 

Buried in the grass, she now abandoned herself to the 
bodily delights of rest, of shade, of coolness, of sweet 
odors ; the scent of the fruits and flowers was heavy on 
the air ; the fall of the water made a familiar tempestuous 
music on her ear; and her fancy, poetic still, though 
deadened by a life of ignorance and toil, was stirred by 
the tender tones of the numberless birds that sang about 
her. 

“ The earth and the air are good,” she thought, as she 
lay there watching the dark leaves sway in the foam and 
the wind, and the bright-bosomed birds float from blos- 
som to blossom. 

For there was latent in her, all untaught, that old pan- 
theistic instinct of the divine age, when the world was 
young, to behold a sentient consciousness in every leaf 
unfolded to the light; to see a soul in every created thing 
the day shines on ; to feel the presence of an eternal life 
in every breeze that moves, in every grass that grows ; 
in every flame that lifts itself to heaven ; in every bell 
that vibrates on the air; in every moth that soars to 
reach the stars. 

Pantheism is the religion of the poet ; and nature had 
made her a poet, though man as yet had but made of her 
an outcast, a slave, and a beast of burden. 

“The earth and the air are good,” she thought, watch- 
ing the sunrays pierce the purple heart of a passion-flower, 
the shadows move across the deep brown water, the 
radiant butterfly alight upon a lily, the scarlet-throated 
birds dart in and out through the yellow feathery blos- 
soms of the limes. 

All birds were her friends. 

Phratos had taught her in her infancy many notes of 
their various songs, and many ways and means of luring 
them to come and rest upon her shoulder and peck the 
berries in her hand. 

She had lived so much in the open fields and among 
the woods that she had made her chief companions of 
them. She could emulate so deftly all their voices, from 
the call of the wood dove to the chant of the blackbird, 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


113 


and from the trill of the nightingale to the twitter of the 
titmouse, that she could summon them all to her at will, 
and have dozens of them fluttering around her head and 
swaying their pretty bodies on her wrist. 

It was one of her ways that seemed to the peasantry so 
weird and magical, and they would come home from their 
fields on a spring daybreak and tell their wives in horror 
how they had seen the devil’s daughter in the red flush 
of the sunrise, ankle-deep in violets, and covered with 
birds from head to foot, hearing their whispers, and 
giving them her messages to carry in return. 

One meek-eyed woman had dared once to say that St. 
Francis had done as much and it had been accredited to 
him as a fair action and virtuous knowledge, but she was 
frowned down and chattered down by her louder neigh- 
bors, who told her that she might look for some sharp 
judgment of heaven for daring to couple together the 
blessed name of the holy saint and the accursed name of 
this foul spirit. 

But all they could say could not break the charmed com- 
munion between Folle-Farine and her feathered comrades. 

She loved them and they her. In the hard winter she 
had always saved some of her scanty meal for them, and 
in the springtime and the summer they always rewarded 
her with floods of songs and soft caresses from their nest- 
ling wings. 

There were no rare birds, no birds of moor and 
mountain, in that cultivated and populous district ; but 
to her all the little home-bred things of pasture and or- 
chard were full of poetry and of characters. 

The robins with that pretty air of boldness with which 
they veil their real shyness and timidity ; the strong and 
saucy sparrows, powerful by the strength of all mediocri- 
ties and majorities ; all the dainty families of finches in 
their gay apparelings ; the plain brown bird that fills the 
night with music; the gorgeous oriole ruffling in gold, 
the gilded princeling of them all ; the little blue warblers, 
the violets of the air ; the kingfishers that have hovered 
so long over the forget-me-nots upon the rivers that they 
have caught the colors of the flowers on their wings; the 
bright blackcaps green as the leaves, with their yellow 


114 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


waistcoats and velvet hoods, the innocent freebooters of 
the woodland liberties ; all these were her friends and 
lovers, various as any hnnian crowds of court or city. 

She loved them ; they and the fourfooted beasts were 
the sole things that did not flee from her; and the woeful 
and mad slaughter of them by the peasants was to her a 
grief passionate in its despair. She did not reason on what 
she felt; but to her a bird slain was a trust betrayed, an 
innocence defiled, a creature of heaven struck to earth. 

Suddenly on the silence of the garden there was a little 
shrill sound of pain ; the birds flew high in air, screaming 
and startled; the leaves of a bough of ivy shook as with 
a struggle. She rose and looked ; a line of twine was 
trembling against the foliage ; in its noosed end the throat 
of the mavis had been caught; it hung trembling and 
clutching at the air convulsively with its little drawn up 
feet. It had flown into the trap as it had ended its joyous 
song and soared up to join its brethren. 

There were a score of such traps set in the miller’s 
garden. 

She unloosed the cord from about its tiny neck, set it 
free, and laid it dow*n upon the ivy ; the succor came too 
late ; the little gentle body was already without breath ; 
the feet had ceased to beat the air; the small soft head 
had drooped feebly on one side; the lifeless eyes had 
started from their sockets ; the throat was without song 
for evermore. 

“ The earth would be good but for men,” she thought, 
as she stood with the little dead bird in her hand. 

Its mate, which was poised on a rose bough, flew 
straight to it, and curled round and round about the 
small slain body, and piteously bewailed its fate, and 
mourned, refusing to be comforted, agitating the air with 
trembling wings, and giving out vain cries of grief. 

Yain ; for the little joyous life was gone; the life that 
asked only of God and Man a home in the green leaves ; 
a drop of dew from the cup of a rose ; a bough to swing 
on in the sunlight; a summer day to celebrate in song. 

All the winter through, it had borne cold and hunger 
and pain without lament; it had saved the soil from de- 
stroying larvae, and purified the trees from all foul germs ; 


FOLLEFARINE. 


115 


it had built its little home unaided, and had fed its nestlings 
without alms ; it had given its sweet song lavishly to the 
winds, to the blossoms, to the empty air, to the deaf ears 
of men; and now it lay dead in its innocence; trapped 
and slain because a human greed begrudged it a berry 
worth the thousandth part of a copper coin. 

Out from the porch of the mill-house Claudis Flamma 
came; with a knife in his hand and a basket to cut lilies 
for one of the choristers of the cathedral, since the morrow 
would be the religious feast of the Visitation of Mary. 

He saw the dead thrush in her hand, and chuckled as 
he went by to himself. 

“ The ten^i bird trapped since sunrise,’’ he said, think- 
ing how shrewd and how sure in their make were these 
traps of twine that he set in the grass and the leaves. 

She said nothing; but a darkness of disgust swept over 
her face, as he came in sight in the distance. 

She knelt down and scraped a hole in the earth and 
laid moss in it and put the mavis softly on its green and 
fragrant bier, and covered it with handfuls of fallen rose 
leaves and with a sprig or two of thyme. Around her 
head the widowed thrush flew ceaselessly, uttering sad 
cries; — who now should wander with him through the 
sunlight? — who now should rove with him above the 
blossoming fields ? — who now should sit with him beneath 
the boughs hearing the sweet rain fall between the leaves? 
— who now should wake with him whilst yet the world 
was dark, to feel the dawn break ere the east were red, 
and sing a welcome to the unborn day ? 


CHAPTER IV. 

Meanwhile Claudis Flamma cut the lilies for the 
cathedral altars, muttering many holy prayers as he 
gathered the flowers of Mary. 

When the white lily sheaves had been borne away, 
kept fresh in wet moss by the young chorister who had 
been sent for them, the miller turned to her. 


116 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


“ Where is the money 

She, standing beside the buried bird, undid the leathern 
thong about her waist, opened the pouch, and counted 
out the coins, one by one, on the flat stone of a water- 
tank among the lilies and the ivy. 

There were a few silver pieces of slight value and some 
dozens of copper ones. The fruit had been left at various 
stalls and houses in small portions, for it was the custom 
to supply it fresh each day. 

He caught them up with avidity, bit and tested each, 
counted them again and again, and yet again ; after the 
third enumeration he turned sharply on her : 

“ There are two pieces too little ; what hStvc you done 
with them 

“ There are two sous short,” she answered him curtly. 
“ Twelve of the figs for the tanner Florian were rotten.” 

“Rotten ! — they were but overripe.” 

“ It is the same thing.” 

“ You dare to answer me ? — animal ! I say they had 
only tasted a little too much of the sun. It only made 
them the sweeter.” 

“ They were rotten.” 

“They were not. You dare to speak! If they had 
been rotten they lay under the others ; he could not have 
seen ” 

“ I saw.” 

“You saw I Who are you? — a beggar — a beast — a 
foul offspring of sin. You dared to show them to him, I 
will warrant ?” 

“I showed him that they were not good.” 

“And gave him back the two sous ?” 

“ I took seven sous for what were good. I took nothing 
for the rotten ones.” 

“ Wretch I you dare to tell me that I” 

A smile careless and sarcastic curled her mouth ; her 
eyes looked at him with all their boldest fiercest luster. 

“ I never steal — not even from you, good Flamma.” 

“You have stolen now!” he shrieked, his thin and 
feeble voice rising in fury at his lost coins and his dis- 
covered treachery. “ It is a lie that the figs were rotten ; 
it is a lie that you' took but seven sous. You stole the 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


in 


two sous to buy you bread and honey in the streets, or 
to get a drink at the wineshops. I know you ; I know 
you ; it is a devil’s device to please your gluttonous appe- 
tite. The figs rotten ! — not so rotten as is your soul 
would they be, though they were black as night and 
though they stunk as river mud*! Go back to Denis 
Florian and bring me the two sous, or I will thrash you 
as a thie.f.” 

She laughed a hard, scornful, reckless laughter. 

“ You can thrash me ; you cannot make me a thief.’’ 

“ You will not go back to Florian ?” 

“ I will not ask him to pay for what was bad.” 

“ You will not confess that you stole the money ?” 

“ I should lie if I did.” 

“ Then strip.” 

She set her teeth in silence; and without a moment’s 
hesitation unloosened the woolen sash knotted round her 
waist, and pushed down the coarse linen shirt from 
about her throat. 

The white folds fell from oS* the perfect curves of her 
brown arms, and left bare her shining shoulders beauti- 
ful as any sculptured Psyche’s. 

She was not conscious of degradation in her punish- 
ment ; she had been bidden to bow her head and endure 
the lash from the earliest years she could remember. 
According to the only creed she knew, silence and forti- 
tude and strength were the greatest of all the virtues. 
She stood now in the cross-lights among the lilies as she 
had stood when a little child, erect, unquailing, and 
ready to suffer, insensible of humiliation because uncon- 
scious of sin, and because so tutored by severity and ex- 
posure that she had as yet none of the shy shame and 
the fugitive shrinking of her sex. 

She had only the boldness to bear, the courage to be 
silent, which she had had when she had stood among • 
the same tall lilies, in the same summer radiance, in the 
years of her helpless infancy. 

She uncovered herself to the lash as a brave hound 
crouches to it; not from inborn cowardice, but simply 
from the habit of obedience and of endurance. 

lie had ever used her as the Greeks the Helots ; he 


118 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


always beat her when she was in fault to teach her to be 
faultless, and when without offense beat her to remind 
her that she was the offspring of humiliation and a slave. 

He took, as he had taken in an earlier time, a thick 
rope which lay coiled upon the turf ready for the binding 
of some straying boughs ; and struck her with it, slowly. 
His arm had lost somewhat of its strength, and his 
power was unequal to his will. Still rage for the loss 
of his copper pieces and the sense that she had discovered 
the fraudulent intention of his small knavery lent force 
to his feebleness ; as the scourge whistled through the 
air and descended on her shoulders it left bruised swollen 
marks to stamp its passage, and curling, adder-like, bit 
and drew blood. 

Yet to the end she stood mute and motionless, as she 
had stood in her childhood ; not a nerve quivered, not a 
limb flinched ; the color rushed over her bent face and 
her bare bosom, but she never made a movement ; she 
never gave a sound. 

When his arm dropped from sheer exhaustion, she 
still said not one word ; she drew tight once more the 
sash about her waist, and fastened afresh the linen of 
her bodice. 

The bruised and wounded flesh smarted and ached and 
throbbed; but she was used to such pain, and bore it as 
their wounds were borne by the women of the Spartan 
games. 

“ Thy two sous have borne thee bitterness,” he mut- 
tered with a smile. “ Thou wilt scarce find fruit rotten 
again in haste. There are bread and beans within ; 
go get a meal ; I want the mule to take flour to Bar- 
bizfene.” 

She did not go within to eat; the bruises and the 
burning of her skin made her feel sick and weak. She 
%went away and cast herself at full length in the shade of 
the long grasses of the orchard, resting her chin upon her 
hands, cooling her aching breast against the soft damp 
moss ; thinking, thinking, thinking, of what she hardly 
knew, except indeed that she wished that she were dead, 
like the bird she had covered with the rose leaves. 

He did not leave her long to even so much peace as 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


119 


this ; his shrill voice soon called her from her rest ; he 
bade her get ready the mule and go. 

She obeyed. 

The mule was saddled with his wooden pack; as many 
sacks as he could carry were piled upon the framework ; 
she put her hand upon his bridle, and set out to walk to 
Barbizene, which was two leagues away. 

“ Work is the only thing to drive the devil that begat 
her out of her,’’ muttered the miller, as he watched the 
old mule pace down the narro\^ tree-shadowed road that 
led across the fields : and he believed that he did rightly 
in this treatment of her. 

It gratified the sharp hard cruelty of temper in him, 
indeed, but be did not think that in such self-indulgence he 
ever erred. He was a bitter, cunning, miserly old man, 
whose solitary tenderness of feeling and honesty of pride 
had been rooted out forever when he had learned the dis- 
honor of the woman whom he had deemed a saint. In 
the ten years of time which had passed since first the 
little brown, large-eyed child had been sent to seek asy- 
lum with him, he had grown harder and keener and more 
severe with each day that rose. 

Her presence was abhorrent to him, though he kept 
her, partly from a savage sense of duty, partly from the 
persuasion that she had the power in her to make the 
strongest and the cheapest slave he had ever owned. 

For the rest, he sincerely and devoutly believed that 
the devil, in some witchery of human guise, had polluted 
his daughter’s body and soul, and that it was by the foul 
fiend and by no earthly lover that she had conceived and 
borne the creature that now abode with him. 

Perhaps, also, as was but natural, he sometimes felt 
more furious against this offspring of hell because ever 
and again some gleam of fantastic inborn honor, some 
strange savage instinct of honesty, would awake in her 
and oppose him, and make him ashamed of those small 
and secret sins of chicanery wherein his soul delighted, 
and for which he compounded with his gods. 

He had left her mind a blank, because he thought the 
body labored hardest when the brain was still asleep, 
which is true; she could not read ; she could not write ; she 


120 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


knew absolutely nothing. Yet there was a soul awake 
in her ; j^et there were innumerable thoughts and dreams 
brooding in her fathomless eyes ; yet there was a desire 
in her fierce and unslaeked for some other life than this life 
of the packhorse and of the day laborer which alone she 
knew. 

He had done his best to degrade and to brutalize her, 
and in much he had succeeded ; but be had not succeeded 
wholly. There was a liberty in her that escaped his 
thraldom ; there was a soul in her that resisted the dead- 
ening influence of her existence. 

She had none of the shame of her sex ; she had none 
of the timorous instincts of womanhood. She had a 
fierce stubborn courage, and she was insensible of the 
daily outrages of her life. She would strip bare to his 
word obediently, feeling only that it would be feeble and 
worthless to dread the pain of the lash. She would 
bathe in the woodland pool, remembering no more that 
she might be watched by human eyes than does the 
young tigress that has never beheld the face of man. 

In all this she was brutalized and degraded by her 
tyrant’s bondage ; in other things she was far higher 
than he and escaped him. 

Stupefied as her mind might be by the exhaustion of 
severe physical labor, it had still irony and it had still 
imagination ; and under the hottest heats of temptation 
there were two things which by sheer instinct she resisted, 
and resisted so that neither of them had ever been forced 
on her — they were falsehood and fear. 

It is the infamous strength of the devil I” said Clau- 
dis Flamma, when he found that he could not force her 
to deviate from the truth. 

The world says the same of those who will not feed it 
with lies. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


121 


CHAPTER Y. 

That long dry summer was followed by au autumn of 
drought and scarcity. 

The prayers of the priests and peoples failed to bring 
down rain. The wooden Christs gazed all day long on 
parching lands and panting cattle. Even the broad deep 
rivers shrank and left their banks to bake and stink in 
tlie long drought. The orchards sickened for lack of 
moisture, and the peasant^ went about with feverish faces, 
ague-stricken limbs, and trembling hearts. The corn 
yielded ill in the hard scorched ground, and when the 
winter came it was a time of dire scarcity and distress. 

Claudis Flanima and a few others like him alone pros- 
pered. 

The mill-house at Ypres served many purposes. It was 
a granary, a market, a baker’s shop, an usurer’s den, all 
in one. 

It looked a sim})le and innocent place. In the summer- 
time it was peaceful and lovely, green and dark and still, 
with the blue sky above it, and the songs of birds all 
around ; with its old black timbers, its many-colored 
orchards, its leafy gardens, its gray walls washed by the 
hurrying stream. 

But in the winter it was very dreary, utterly lonely. 
The water roared, and the leafless trees groaned in the 
wind, and the great leaden clouds of rain or fog envel- 
oped it duskily. 

To the starving, wet, and woe-begone peasants who 
would go to it with aching bones and aching hearts, it 
seemed desolate and terrible; they dreaded with a great 
dread the sharp voice of its master — the hardest and the 
shrewdest and the closest-Qsted Norman of them all. 

For they were most of them his debtors, and so were 
in a bitter subjugation to him, and had to pay those 
debts as best they might with their labor or their suffer- 
ing, with the best of all their wool, or oil, or fruit; often 


122 


FOLLE-FARINE, 


with the last bit of silver that had been an heirloom for 
five centuries, or with the last bit of money buried away 
in an old pitcher under their apple-tree to be the nest-egg* 
of their little pet daughter’s dowry. 

And yet Claudis Flamma was respected among them ; 
for he could outwit them, and was believed to be very 
wealthy, and was a man who stood well with the good 
saints and with holy church, — a wise man, in a word, 
with whom these northern folks had the kinship of 
mutual industry and avarice. 

For the most part the population around Ypres was 
thrifty and thriving in a cautious, patient, certain way 
of well-doing; and by this portion of it the silent old 
miser was much honored as a man laborious and penuri- 
ous, who chose to live on a leek and a rye loaf, but who 
must have, it was well known, put by large gains in the 
thatch of his roof or under the bricks of his kitchen. 

By the smaller section of it — poor, unthrifty, loose- 
handed fools — who belied the province of their birth so 
far as to be quick to spend and slow to save, and who so 
fell into want and famine and had to borrow of others 
their children’s bread, the old miller was hated with a 
hate deeper and stronger because forced to be mute, and 
to submit, to cringe, and to be trod upon, in the miserable 
servitude of the hopeless debtor. 

In the hard winter which followed on that sickly 
autumn, these and their like fell further in the mire of 
poverty than ever, and had to come and beg of Flamma 
loans of the commonest necessaries of their bare living. 
They knew that they would have to pay a hundredfold 
in horrible extortion when the spring and summer 
should bring them work, and give them fruit on their 
trees and crops on their little fields ; but they could do 
no better. 

It had been for many years the custom to go to Flamma 
in such need ; and being never quit of his hold his debt- 
ors never could try for aid elsewhere. 

The weather towards the season of Noel became fright- 
fully severe ; the mill stream never stopped, but all around 
it was frozen, and the swamped pastures were sheets of 
ice. The birds died by thousands in the open country, 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


123 


and several of the sheep perished in snowstorms on the 
higher lands. 

There was dire want in many of the hovels and home- 
steads, and the bare harvests of a district usually so opu- 
lent in all riches of the soil brought trouble and dearth in 
their train. Sickness prevailed because the old people 
and the children in their hunger ate berries and roots 
unfit for human food; the waters swelled, the ice melted, 
many homes were flooded, and some even swept away. 

Old Pitchou and Claudis Flamma alone were content; 
the mill wheel never stopped work, and famine prices 
could be asked in this extremity. 

Folle-Farine worked all that winter, day after day, 
month after month, with scarcely a word being spoken 
to her, or scarcely an hour being left her that she could 
claim as her own. 

She looked against the snow as strangely as a scarlet 
rose blossoming in frost there could have done ; but the 
people that came to and fro, even the young men among 
them, were too used to that dark vivid silent face of hers, 
and those lithe brown limbs that had the supple play 
and the golden glow of the East in them, to notice them 
as any loveliness: and if they did note them on some rare 
time, thought of them only as the marks of a vagrant and 
accursed race. 

She was so unlike to themselves that the northern 
peasantry never dreamed of seeing beauty in her ; they 
turned their heads away when she went by, striding 
after her mule or bearing her pitcher from the well with 
the free and vigorous grace of a mountain or desert-born 
creature. 

The sheepskin girt about her loins, the red kerchief 
knotted to her head, the loose lithe movements of her 
beautiful limbs, the fire and dreams in her musing eyes — 
all these were so unlike themselves that they saw nothing 
in them except what was awful or unlovely. 

Half the winter went by without a kind word to her 
from any one except such as in that time of suffering and 
scarcity Marcellin spoke to her. So had every winter 
gone since she had come there — a time so long ago that 
the memory of Fhratos had become so dim to her that 


124 


FOLLE-FAUINE. 


she often doubted if he also were not a mere shadow of a 
dream like all the rest. 

Half the winter she fared hardly and ate sparingly, 
and did the work of the mule and the bullocks — indif- 
ferent and knowing no better, and only staring at the 
stars when they throbbed in the black skies on a frosty 
night, and wondering if she would ever go to them, or if 
they would ever come to her — those splendid and familiar 
unknown things that looked on all the misery of the earth, 
and shone on tranquilly and did not seem to care. 

I'ime came close on to the new year, and the distress 
and the cold were together at their height. The weather 
was terrible ; and the poor suffered immeasurably. 

A score of times a-day she heard them ask bread at the 
mill, and a score of times saw them given a stone ; she 
saw them come in the raw fog, pinched and shivering, and 
sick with ague, and she saw her grandsire deny them 
with a grating sarcasm or two, or take from them fifty 
times its value for some niggard grant of food. 

“ Why should I think of it, why should I care she 
said to herself; and yet she did both, and could not help it. 

There was among the sufferers one old and poor, who 
lived not far from the mill, by name Manon Dax. 

She was a little old hardy brown woman, shriveled 
and bent, yet strong, with bright eyes like a robin’s, and 
a tough frame, eighty years old. 

She had been southern born, and the wife of a stone-cut- 
ter; he had been dead fifty years, and she had seen all her 
sons and daughters and their offspring die too ; and had 
now left on her hand to rear four young great-grandchil- 
dren, almost infants, who were always crying to her for 
food as new-born birds cry in their nests. 

She washed a little when she could get any linen to 
wash, and she span, and she picked up the acorns and the 
nuts, and she tilled a small plot of ground that belonged 
to her hut, and she grew cabbages and potatoes and herbs 
on it, and so kept a roof over her head, and fed her four 
nestlings, and trotted to and fro in her wooden shoes all 
day long, and worked in hail and rain, in drought and 
tempest, and never complained, but said that God was 
good to her. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


125 


She was anxious about the children, knowing she could 
not live long — that was all. But then she felt sure that 
the Mother of God would take care of them, and so was 
cheerful ; and did what the day brought her to do, and 
was content. 

Now on Manon Dax, as on thousands of others, the 
unusual severity of the winter fell like a knife. She was 
only one among thousands. 

Nobody noticed her ; still it was hard. 

All the springs near her dwelling were frozen for many 
weeks ; there was no well nearer than half a league, and 
half a league out and half a league back every day over 
ground sharp and slippery with ice, with two heavy pails 
to carry, is not a little when one is over eighty, and has 
only a wisp of woolen serge between the wind and one’s 
withered limbs. 

The acorns and horse-chestnuts had all been disputed 
wdth her fiercely by boys rough and swift, who foresaw a 
hard time coming in which their pigs would be ill fed. 
The roots in her little garden-plot were all black and 
killed by the cold. The nettles had been all gathered 
and stewed and eaten. 

The snow drove in through a big hole in her roof. The 
woods were ransacked for every bramble and broken 
bough by rievers younger and more agile than herself ; 
she had nothing to eat, nothing to burn. 

The children lay in their little beds of hay and cried all 
day long for food, and she had none to give them. 

“If it were only myself 1” she thought, stopping her 
ears not to hear them ; if it had been only herself it would 
have been so easy to creep away into the corner among 
the dry grass, and to lie still till the cold froze the pains 
of hunger and made them quiet ; and to feel numb and 
tired, and yet glad that it was all over, and to murmur 
that God was good, and so to let death come — content. 

But it was not only herself. 

The poor are seldom so fortunate — they themselves 
would say so unhappy — as to be alone in their homes. 

There were the four small lives left to her by the poor 
dead foolish things she had loved, — small lives that had 
been rosy even on so much hunger, and blithe even amidst 

11 * 


126 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


' so much cold ; that had been mirthful even at the flood- 
ing of the snowdrift, and happy even over a meal of 
mouldy crusts, or of hips aud haws from the hedges. 
Had been — until now, when even so much as this could 
not be got, and when their beds of hay were soaked 
through with snow-water ; now — when they were quite 
silent, except when they sobbed out a cry for bread. 

“I am eighty-two years old, and I have never since I 
was born asked man or woman for help, or owed man or 
woman a copper coin,” she thought, sitting by her black 
hearth, across which the howling wind drove, and stop- 
ping her ears to shut out the children’s cries. 

She had often known severe winters, scanty food, bitter 
living, — she had scores of times in her long years been as 
famished as this, and as cold, and her house had been as 
desolate. Yet she had borne it all and never asked for 
an alms, being strong amd ignorant, and being also in 
fear of the world, and holding a debt a great shame. 

But now she knew that she must do it, or let those 
children perish ; being herself old and past work, and 
having seen all her sons die out in their strength before 
her. 

The struggle was long and hard with her. She would 
have to die soon, she knew, and she had striven all her 
lifetime so to live that she might die saying, “ I have 
asked nothing of any man.” 

This perhaps, she thought sadly, had been only a pride 
after all ; a feeling foolish and wicked, that the good God 
sought now to chasten. Anyway she knew that she 
must yield it up and go and ask for something; or else 
those four small things, who were like a cluster of red 
berries on a leafless tree, must suffer and must perish. 

“It is bitter, but I must do it,” she thought. “Sure 
it is strange that the good God cares to take any of us to 
himself through so sharp a way as hunger. It seems, if 
I saw His face now, I should say, ‘Not heaven for me. 
Monseigneur: only bread and a little wood.’” 

And she rose up on her bent stiff limbs, and went to 
the pile of hay on which the children were lying, pale 
and thin, but trying to smile, all of them, because they 
saw the tears on her cheeks. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


12t 


“ Be still, my treasures,” she said to them, striving to 
speak cheerily, and laying her hands on the curls of the 
eldest born; “I go away for a little while to try and get 
you food. Be good, Bernardou, and take care of them 
till I come back.” 

Bernardou promised, being four years old himself ; and 
she crept out of the little black door of the hut on to the 
white road and into the rushing winds. 

“ I will go to Flamma,” she said to herself. 

It was three in the afternoon, nearly dark at this sea- 
son of midwinter. 

The business of the day was done. The people had 
come and gone, favored or denied, according to such 
sureties as they could offer. The great wheel worked on 
in the seething water; the master of the mill sat against 
the casement to catch the falling light, adding up the 
sums in his ledger — crooked little signs such as he had 
taught himself to understand, though he could form 
neither numerals nor letters with his pen. 

All around him in the storehouses there were corn, 
wood, wool, stores of every sort of food. All around 
him, in the room he lived in, there were hung the salt 
meats, the sweet herbs, and the dried fruits, that he had 
saved from the profusion of other and healthier years. 
It pleased him to know that he held all that, and also 
withheld it. It moved him with a certain saturnine glee 
to see the hungry wistful eyes of the peasants stare long- 
ingly at all those riches, whilst their white lips faltered 
out an entreaty — which he denied. 

It was what he liked ; to sit there and count his gains 
after his fashion, and look at his stores and listen to the 
howling wind and driving hail, and chuckle to think how 
lean and cold and sick they were outside — those fools 
who mocked him because his saint had been a gypsy’s 
leman. 

To be prayed to for bread, and give the stone of a 
bitter denial ; to be implored with tears of supplication, 
and answer with a grim jest ; to see a woman come with 
children dying for food, and to point out to her the big 
brass pans full of milk, and say to her “ All that makes 
butter for Paris,” and then see her go away wailing and 


128 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


moaning that her child would die, and tottering feebly 
through the snow — all this was sweet to him. 

Before his daughter had gone from him, he had been, 
though a hard man, yet honest, and had been, though 
severe, not cruel ; but since he had been aware of the 
shame of the creature whom he had believed in as an 
angel, every fiber in him had been embittered and salted 
sharp with the poignancy of an acrid hate towards all 
living things. To hurt and to wound, and to see what 
he thus struck bleed and suffer, was the only pleasure 
life had left for him. He had all his manhood walked 
justly, according to his light, and trusted in the God to 
whom he prayed ; and his God and his child had denied 
and betrayed him, and his heart had turned to gall. 

The old woman toiled slowly through the roads which 
lay between her hut and the water-mill. 

They were roads which passed through meadows and 
along cornfields, beside streamlets, and among little belts 
of woodland, lanes and paths green and pleasant in the 
summer, but now a slough of frozen mud, and whistled 
through by northeast winds. She held on her way 
steadily, stumbling often, and often slipping and going 
slowly, for she was very feeble from "long lack of food, 
and the intensity of the cold drove through and through 
her frame. Still she held on bravely, in the teeth of 
the rough winds and of the coming darkness, though the 
weather was so wild that the poplar-trees were bent to 
the earth, and the little light in the Calvary lamp by the 
river blew to and fro, and at last died out. Still she held 
on, ^ little dark, tottering figure, with a prayer on her 
lips and a hope in her heart. 

The snow was falling, the clouds were driving, the 
waters were roaring, in the twilight : she was only a 
little black speck in the vast gray waste of the earth and 
the sky, and the furious air tossed her at times to and 
fro like a withered leaf. But she would not let it beat 
her ; she groped her way with infinite difficulty, grasping 
a bough for strength, or waiting under a tree for breath 
a moment, and thus at last reached the mill-house. 

Such light as there was left showed her the kitchen 
within, the stores of wood, the strings of food ; it looked 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


129 


to her as it had looked to Phratos, a place of comfort and 
of plenty; a strong safe shelter from the inclement night. 

She lifted the latch and crept in, and went straight to 
Claudis Flamma, who was still busy beneath the window 
with those rude signs which represented to him his 
earthly wealth. 

She stood before him white from the falling snow, 
with her brown face working with a strong emotion, her 
eyes clear and honest, and full of an intense anxiety of 
appeal. 

“ Flamma,” she said simply to him, “ we have been 
neighbors fifty years and more — thou and I, and many 
have borrowed of thee to their hurt and shame, but I 
never. I am eighty-two, and I never in my days asked 
anything of man or woman or child. But I come to- 
night to ask bread of you, — bread for the four little 
children at home. I have heard them cry three days, 
and have had nothing to give them save a berry or two 
off th9 trees. I cannot bear it any more. So I have 
come to you.” 

He shut his ledger, and looked at her. They had been 
neighbors, as she had said, half a century and more ; 
and had often knelt down before the same altar, side by 
side. 

“ What dost want ?” he asked simply. 

“Food,” she made answer; “food and fuel. They 
are so cold — the little ones.” 

“ What canst pay for them ?” he asked. 

“ Nothing — nothing now. There is not a thing in the 
house except the last hay the children sleep on. But 
if thou wilt let me have a little — just a little — while the 
weather is so hard, I will find means to pay when the 
weather breaks. There is my garden ; and I can wash 
and spin. I will pay faithfully. Thou knowest I never 
owed a brass coin to any man. But I am so old, and 
the children so young ” 

Claudis Flamma got up and walked to the other side 
of the kitchen. 

Her eyes followed him with wistful, hungry longing. 
Where he went there stood pans of new milk, baskets of 
eggs, rolls of bread, piles of fagots. Her feeble heart 


130 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


beat thicldy with eager hope, her dim eyes glowed with 
pleasure and with thankfulness 

He came back and brought to her a few sharp rods, 
plucked from a thorn-tree. 

“ Give these to thy children’s children,” he said, with 
a dark smile. ‘‘ For these — and for no more — will they 
recompense thee when they shall grow to maturity.” 

She looked at him startled and disquieted, yet think- 
ing that he meant but a stern jest. 

“ Good Flamma, you mock me,” she murmured, trem- 
bling; “the babies are little, and good. Ah, give me 
food quickly, for God’s sake I A jest is well in season, 
but to an empty body and a bitter heart it is like a 
stripe.” 

He smiled, and answered her in his harsh grating 
voice, — 

“ I give thee the only thing given without payment in 
this world — advice. Take it or leave it.” 

She reeled a little as if he had struck her a blow, with 
his fist, and her face changed terribly, whilst her eyes 
stared without light or sense in them, 

“ You jest, Flamma I You only jest I” she muttered. 
“ The little children starve, I tell you. You will give 
mo bread for them ? Just a little bread ? I will pay as 
soon as the weather breaks.” 

“I can give nothing. I am poor, very poor,” he 
answered her, with the habitual lie of the miser; and he 
opened his ledger again, and went on counting up the 
dots and crosses by which he kept his books. 

His servant Pitchou sat spinning by the hearth : she 
did not cease her work, nor intercede by a word. The 
poor can be better to the poor than any princes ; but the 
poor can also be more cruel to the poor than any slave- 
drivers. 

The old woman’s head dropped on her breast, she 
turned feebly, and felt her way, as though she were 
blind, out of the house and into the air. It was already 
dark with the darkness of the descending night. 

The snow was falling fast. Her hope was gone ; all 
was cold — cold as death. 

She shivered and gasped, and strove to totter on : the 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


131 


children were alone. The winds blew and drove the 
snowflakes in a white cloud against her face ; the bend- 
ing trees creaked and groaned as though in pain ; the 
roar of the mill-water filled the air. 

There was now no light : the day was gone, and the 
moon was hidden ; beneath her feet the frozen earth 
cracked and slipped and gave way. She fell down; 
being so old and so weakly she could not rise again, but 
lay still with one limb broken under her, and the winds 
and the snowstorm beating together upon her. 

“ The children ! the children !” she moaned feebly, and 
then was still ; she was so cold, and the snow fell so 
fast; she could not lift herself nor see what was around 
her ; she thought that she was in her bed at home, and 
felt as though she would soon sleep. 

Through the dense gloom around her there came a 
swiftly-moving shape, that flew as silently and as quickly 
as a night-bird, and paused as though on wings beside 
her. 

A voice that was at once timid and fierce, tender and 
savage, spoke to her through the clouds of driven snow- 
spray. 

“ Hush, it is 1 1 I — Folle-Farine. I have brought you 
my food. It is not much — they never give me much. 
Still it will help a little. I heard what you said — I 
was in the loft. Flamma must not know ; he might 
make you pay. But it is all mine, truly mine ; take it.’’ 

“ Food — for the children !” 

The blessed word aroused her from her lethargy ; she 
raised herself a little on one arm, and tried to see whence 
the voice came that spoke to her. 

But the effort exhausted her; she fell again to the 
ground with a groan — her limb was broken. 

Folle-Farine stood above her ; her dark eyes gleaming 
like a haw^k’s through the gloom, and full of a curious, 
startled pity. 

“You cannot get up; you are old,” she said abruptly. 
‘‘ See— let me carry you home. The children ! yes, the 
children can have it. It is not much ; but it will serve.” 

She spoke hastily and roughly ; she was ashamed of 
her own compassion. What was it to her whether any of 


132 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


these people lived or died ? They had always mocked 
and hated her. 

“ If I did right, I should let them rot, and spit on their 
corpses,” she thought, with the ferocity of vengeance 
that ran in her Oriental blood. 

Yet she had come out in the storm, and had brought 
away her food for strangers, though she had been at 
work all day long, and was chilled to the bone, and was 
devoured with ravenous hunger. 

Why did she do it ? 

She did not know. She scorned herself. But she was 
sorry for this woman, so poor and so brave, with her 
eighty-two years, and so bitterly denied in her extremity. 

Manoii Dax dimly caught the muttered words, and 
feebly strove to answer them, whilst the winds roared 
and the snow beat upon her fallen body. 

“ I cannot rise,” she murmured ; “ my leg is broken, I 
think. But it is no matter. Go you to the little ones ; 
whoever you are, you are good, and have pity. Go to 
them, go. It is no matter for me. I have lived my life 
. — anyway. It will soon be over. I am not in pain — 
indeed.” 

Folle-Farine stood in silence a minute, then she stooped 
and lifted the old creature in her strong young arms, and 
with that heavy burden set out on her way in the teeth 
of the storm. 

She had long known the woman, and the grandchildren, 
by sight and name. 

Once or twice when she had passed by them, the 
grandam, tender of heart, but narrow of brain, and be- 
lieving all the tales of her neigbors, had drawn the little 
ones closer to her, under the wing of her serge cloak, lest 
the evil eye that had bewitched the tanner’s youngest 
born, should fall on them,, and harm them in like manner. 

Nevertheless the evil eyes gleamed on her with a wist- 
ful sorrow, as Folle-Farine bore her with easy strength 
and a sure step, through the frozen woodland ways, as 
she would have borne the load of wood, or the sacks oi 
corn, that she was so well used to carry to and fro like a 
packhorse. 

Manon Dax did not stir nor struggle, she did not even 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


133 


strive to speak again ; she was vaguely sensible of a slow, 
buoyant, painless movement, of a close, soft pressure that 
sheltered her from the force of the winds, of a subtle 
warmth that stole through her emaciated aching frame, 
and made her drowsy and forgetful, and content to be 
still. 

She could do no more. Her day for struggle and for 
work was done. 

Once she moved a little. Her bearer paused and 
stopped and listened. 

“ Hid you speak she whispered. 

Manon Dax gave a soft troubled sigh. 

“ God is good,” she muttered, like one speaking in a 
dream. 

Folle-Farine held on her way; fiercely blown, blinded 
by the snow, pierced by the blasts of the hurricane, but 
sure of foot on the ice as a reindeer, and sure of eye in 
the dark as a night-hawk. 

“ Are you in pain?” she asked once of the burden she 
carried. 

There was no answer. Old Manon seemed to sleep. 

The distance of the road was nothing to her, fleet and 
firm of step, and inured to all hardships of the weather; 
yet short as it was, it cost her an hour to travel it, 
heavily weighted as she was, soaked with snow-water, 
blown back continually by the opposing winds, and 
forced to stagger and to pause by the fury of the 
storm. 

At last she reached the hut. 

The wind had driven open the door. The wailing cries 
of the children echoed sorrowfully on the stillness, an- 
swered by the bleating of sheep, cold and hungry in their 
distant folds. The snow had drifted in unchecked ; all 
was quite dark. 

She felt her way within, and being used by long custom 
to see in the gloom, as the night-haunting beasts and 
birds can see, she found the bed of hay, and laid her 
burden gently down on it. 

The children ceased their wailing, and the two eldest 
ones crept up close to their grandmother, and pressed 
their cheeks to hers, and whispered to her eagerly, with 

12 


134 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


their little famished lips, “ Where is the food, where is 
the food V 

But there was still no answer. 

The clouds drifted a little from the moon that ha-d 
been so long obscured ; it shone for a moment through 
the vapor of the heavy sky; the whitened ground tlirew 
back the rays increased tenfold ; the pale gleam reached 
the old still face of Manon Dax. 

There was a feeble smile upon it — the smile with 
w^hich her last words had been spoken in the darkness ; 
“ God is good 1” 

She was quite dead. 


CHAPTER YI. 

All that night Folle-Farine tarried with the children. 

The youngest had been suffocated whilst they had been 
alone, by the snow which had fallen through the roof, and 
from which its elders had been too small and weakly to 
be able to drag it out, unaided. 

She laid it, stiff already in the cold of the night, beside 
the body of its old grandam, who had perished in en- 
deavoring to save it ; they lay together, the year-old child 
and the aged woman, the broken bud and the leafless 
bough.'^ They had died of hunger, as the birds die on the 
moors and plains; it is a common fate. 

She stayed beside the children, who were frightened 
and bewildered and quite mute. She divided such food 
as she had brought between them, not taking any herself. 
She took off the sheepskin which she wore in winter, tied 
round her loins as her outdoor garment, and made a little 
nest of it for the three, and covered them with it. She 
could not close the door, from the height of the drifted 
snow, and the wind poured in all night long, though in 
an hour the snow ceased to fall. Now and then the clouds 
parting a little, let a ray of the moon stray in ; apd then 
she could see the quiet faces of the old dead woman and 
the child. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


135 


They die of famine — and they die saying their ‘ God 
is good/ ” she thought and she pondered on it deeply, 
and with the bitter and melancholy irony which life had 
already taught her, while the hours of the night dragged 
slowly on; the winds howled above the trembling hovel, 
and the children sobbed themselves to sleep at last, lulled 
by the warmth of the skin, into. which they crept to- 
gether like young birds in a nest. 

She sat there patiently ; frozen and ravenous ; yet not 
drawing a corner of the sheepskin to her own use, nor 
regretting a crumb of the bread she had surrendered. 
She hated the human race, whose hand wms always 
against her. She had no single good deed to thank them 
for, nor any single gentle word. Yet she was sorry for 
that old creature, who had been so bitterly dealt with all 
her years through, and who had died saying “ God is 
good.” She was sorry for those little helpless, uncon- 
scious starving animals, who had lost the only life_ that 
could labor for them. 

She forgave — because she forgot — that in other winters 
this door had been shut against her, as against an ac- 
cursed thing, and these babes had mocked her in their 
first imperfect speech. 

The dawn broke ; the sharp gray winter’s day came ; 
the storm had lulled, but the whole earth was frost-bound 
and white with snow, and the air was piercing, and the 
sky dark and overcast. 

She had to leave them ; she was bound to her daily 
labor at the mill, she knew that if when the sun rose she 
should be found absent, she and they too would surely 
suffer. What to do for them she could not tell. She had 
no friend save Marcellin, who himself was as poor as 
these. She never spoke to any living thing, except a 
sheep-dog, or a calf bleating for its mother, or a toil-worn 
bullock staggering over the plowed clods. 

Between her and all those around her there were per- 
petual enmity and mistrust, and scarcely so much of a 
common bond as lies in a common humanity. For in her 
title to a common humanity with them they disbelieved ; 
while she in her scorn rejected claim to it. 

At daybreak there passed by the open door in the mist 


136 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


a peasant going to his cattle in the fields beyond, push- 
ing through the snow a rude hand-cart full of turnips, 
and other winter food. 

She rose and called to him. 

He stared and stood still. 

She went to the doorway and signed to him. 

“ Old Manon Dax is dead. Will you tell the people ? 
The children are here, alone, and they starve.” 

“ Manon Dax dead ? ” he echoed stupidly : he was her 
nearest neighbor ; he had helped her fetch her washing- 
water sometimes from the well half a league away ; when 
his wife had been down with fever and ague, the old 
woman had nursed her carefully and well through many 
a tedious month. 

“ Yes, I found her on the road, in the snow, last night. 
She had broken her leg, and she was dead before I got 
here. Go and send some one. The little children are 
all alone, and one of them is dead ;too.” 

It was so dark still, that he had not seen at first who 
it was that addressed him ; but slowly, as he stared and 
stared, and drew nearer to her, he recognized the scarlet 
girdle, the brown limbs, the straight brow, the fathomless 
eyes. And he feared her, with a great fear rising there 
suddenly, before him, out of that still white world of dawn 
and shadow. 

He dropped the handles of his cart and fled ; a turn in 
the road, and the darkness of the morning, soon hid him 
from sight. She thought that he had gone to summon 
his people, and she went back and sat again^by the sleep- 
ing children, and watched the sad still faces of the dead. 

The peasant flew home as swiftly as his heavy shoes 
and the broken ice of the roads would allow. 

His cabin was at some distance, at a place where, 
amidst the fields, a few huts, a stone crucifix, some barns 
and stacks, and a single wineshop made up a little village, 
celebrated in the district for its wide-spreading orchards 
and their excellence of fruits. 

Even so early the little hamlet was awake ; the shutters 
were opened ; the people were astir ; men were brushing 
the snow from their thresholds ; women were going out 
to their field-work ; behind the narrow lattices the sleepy- 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


13Y 


eyes and curly heads of children peered, while their 
finders played with the fanciful incrustations of the frost. 

The keeper of the tavern was unbarring his house door ; 
a girl broke the ice in a pool for her ducks to get at the 
water ; a few famished robins flew to and fro songless. 

His own wife was on her doorstep ; to her he darted. 

“ Manon Dax is dead ! ” he shouted. 

“ What of that?” said his wife shouldering her broom ; 
a great many had died that winter, and they were so 
poor and sharp-set with famine themselves, that they had 
neither bread nor pity to spare. 

“ This of that, ” said the man, doggedly, and full of 
the excitement of his own terrors. “ The young devil of 
Ypres has killed her, that I am sure. She is there in the 
hut, in the dark, with her eyes glaring like coals. And for 
what should she be there if not for evil? Tell me 
that.” 

“ Is it possible ?” his wife cried, incredulous, yet will- 
ing to believe ; while the girl left her ducks, and the 
wineshop-keeper his door, and the women their cabins, 
and came and stood round the bearer of such strange 
news. It was very welcome news in a raw frost-bitten 
dawn, when a day was beginning that would otherwise 
have had nothing more wonderful in it than tidings of 
how a litter of black pigs throve, and how a brown horse 
had fared with the swelling in the throat. 

They were very dull there from year’s end to year’s 
end ; once a month, maybe, a letter would come in from 
some soldier-son or brother, or a peddler coming to buy 
eggs would bring likewise some stray rumor from the 
outer world ; — beyond this there was no change. They 
heard nothing, and saw nothing, seldom moving a league 
away from that gray stone crucifix, round which their 
little homes were clustered. 

This man had nothing truly to tell; he had fled hor- 
rified to be challenged in the twilight, and the snow, by 
a creature of such evil omen as Folle-Farine. But when 
he had got an audience, he was too true an orator and 
not such a fool as to lose it for such a little beggarly mat- 
ter as truth ; and his tongue clacked quickly of all which 
his fears and fancies had conceived, until he had talked 
12 * 


138 


FOLLE-FARTNE. 


himself and his listeners into the full belief that Manon 
Dax being belated had encountered the evil glance of the 
daughter of all evil, and had been slain thereby in most 
cruel sorcery. 

Now, in the whole neighborhood there was nothing 
too foul to be accredited of the begotten of the fiend : — a 
fiend, whom all the grown men and women remembered 
so well in his earthly form, when he had come to ruin 
poor Reine Flamma’s body and soul, with his eyes like 
jewels, and his strength passing the strength of all men. 

The people listened, gaping, and wonder-struck, and 
forgetting the bitterness of the cold, being warmed with 
those unfailing human cordials of foul suspicion and of 
gratified hatred. Some went off to their daily labor, being 
unable to spare time for more gossip ; but divers women, 
who had nothing to occupy them, remained about Flandrin. 

A shriveled dame, who owned the greatest number of 
brood-hens in the village, who had only one son, a priest, 
and who was much respected and deferred to by her 
neighbors, spoke first when Flandrin had ended his tale 
for the seventh time, it being a little matter to him that 
his two hungry cows would be lowing all the while vainly 
for their morning meal. 

“Flandrin, you have said well, beyond a doubt; the 
good soul has been struck dead by sorcery. But, you 
have forgot one thing, the children are there, and that 
devil of Yprhs is with them. We — good Christians and 
true — should not let such things be. Go, and drive her 
out and bring the young ones hither.” 

Flandrin stood silent. It was very well to say that 
the devil should be driven out, but it was not so well to 
be the driver. 

“ That is as it should be,” assented the other women. 
“ Go, Flandrin, and we — we will take the little souls in 
for this day, and then give them to the public charity ; 
better cannot be done. Go.” 

“But mind that thou dost strike that beast, Folle- 
Farine, sharply,” cried his wife. 

“ If thou showest her the cross, she will have to grovel 
and flee,” said another. 

“Not she,” grumbled the old dame, whose son was a 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


139 


priest. “ One day my blessed son, who is nearly a saint, 
Heaven knows, menaced her with his cross, and she 
stood straight, and fearless, and looked at it, and said ‘ By 
that sign you do all manner of vileness in this world, and 
say you are to be blest in another ; I know I’ and so 
laughed and went on. What are you to do with a witch 
like that, — eh 

“ Go, Flandrin,’’ shrieked the women in chorus. “ Go I 
Every minute you waste, the little angels are nearer to 
bell 1’’ 

“ Come yourselves with me, then,” said Flandrin, sul- 
lenly. “ I will not go after those infants, it is not a man’s 
work. ” 

In his own mind he was musing on a story his priests 
had often told him, of swine into which exorcised devils 
had entered, and dispatched swiftly down a slope to a 
miserable end ; and he thought of his own pigs, black, 
fat, and happy, worth so much to him in the market. 
Better, he mused, that Manon Dax’s grandchildren should 
be the devil’s prey, than those, his choicest, swine. 

The women jeered him, menaced him, flouted him, be- 
sought him. But vainly — he would not move alone, 
lie had become possessed with the terrors that his own 
fancy had created ; and he would not stir a step for all 
their imprecations. 

“ Let us go ourselves, then 1” screamed his wife at 
length, flourishing above her head the broom with which 
she had swept the snow. “ Men are forever cowards. 
It shall never be said of me, that I left those babes to the 
fiend while I gave my own children their porridge by the 
fire !” 

There was a sentiment in this that stirred all her com- 
panions to emulation. They rushed into their homes, 
snatched a shovel, a staff, a broom, a pegstick, each what- 
ever came uppermost, and, dragging Flandrin in the 
midst, went down the sloping frozen road between its 
fringe of 'poplars. They were not veiy sure in their own 
minds why they went, nor for what they went ; but they 
had a vague idea of doing what was wise and pious, and 
they had a great hate in their hearts against her. 

They sped as fast as the slippery road would let them. 


140 


FOLLE-FARTNE. 


and their tongues flew still faster than their feet ; the cold 
of the daybreak made them sharp and keen on their prey ; 
they screamed themselves hoarse, their voices rising 
shrilly above the whistling of the winds, and the creaking 
of the trees ; and they inflamed each other with ferocious 
belief in the sorcery they were to punish. 

They were in their way virtuous ; they were content 
on very little, they toiled hard from their birth to their 
grave, they were most of them chaste wives and devoted 
mothers, they bore privation steadily, and they slaved in 
fair weather and foul without a complaint. But they 
were narrow of soul, greedy of temper, bigoted and 
uncharitable, and, where they thought themselves or their 
offspring menaced, implacable. They were of the stuff 
that would be burned for a creed, and burn others for 
another creed. It is the creed of the vast majority of 
every nation ; the priests and lawgivers of every nation 
have always told their people that it is a creed holy and 
honorable — how can the people know that it is at once 
idiotic and hellish ? 

Folle-Farine sat within on the damp hay under the 
broken roof, and watched the open door. 

The children were still asleep. The eldest one in his 
sleep had turned and caught her hand, and held it. 

She did not care for them. They had screamed, and 
run behind the woodstack, or their grandam’s skirts, a 
hundred times when they had seen her on the road or in 
the orchard. But she was sorry for them ; almost as 
sorry as she was for the little naked woodpigeons when 
their nests were scattered on the ground in a tempest, or 
for the little starveling rabbits when they screamed in 
their holes for the soft, white mother that was lying, tor- 
tured and twisted, in the jaws of a steel trap. 

She was sorry for them — half roughly, half tenderly — 
with some shame at her own weakness, and yet too sin- 
cerely sorry to be able to persuade herself to leave them 
to their fate there, all alone with their dead. 

For in the savage heart of Taric’s daughter there was 
an innermost corner wherein her mother’s nature slept. 

She sat there quite still, watching the open porch and 
listening for footsteps. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


141 


The snow was driven in circling clouds by the winds ; 
the dense fog of the dawn lifted itself off the surrounding 
fields ; the branches of the trees were beautiful with 
hanging icicles^ from the meadow hard by there wailed 
unceasingly the mournful moaning of Flandrin’s cattle, 
deserted of their master and hungry in their wooden sheds. 

She heard a distant convent clock strike six ; no one 
came. Yet, she had resolved not to leave the children 
all alone; though Flamma should come and find her there, 
and thrash her for her absence from his tasks. So she 
sat still and waited. 

After a little she heard the crisp cracking of many feet 
on the frozen snow and ice-filled ruts of the narrow road ; 
she heard a confused clatter of angry voices breaking 
harshly on the stillness of the winter morning. 

The light was stronger now, and through the doorway 
she saw the little passionate crowd of angry faces as tho 
women pressed onward down the hill with Flandrin in 
their midst. 

She rose and looked out at them quietly. 

For a minute they paused — irresolute, silent, per- 
plexed : at the sight of her they were half daunted ; they 
felt the vagueness of the crime they came to bring against 
her. 

The wife of Flandrin recovered speech first, and dared 
them to the onslaught. 

“ What I” she screamed, “ nine good Christians fearful 
of one daughter of hell ? Fie I for shame I Look ; my 
leaden Peter is round my neckl Is he not stronger than 
she any day V' 

In a moment more, thus girded at and guarded at the 
same time, they were through the door and on the mud 
floor of the hearth, close to her, casting hasty glances at 
the poor dead body on the hearth, whose fires they had 
left to die out all through that bitter winter. They came 
about her in a fierce, gesticulating, breathless troop, flour- 
ishing their sticks in her eyes, and casting at her a 
thousand charges in one breath. 

Flandrin stood a little aloof, sheepishly on the threshold, 
wishing he had never said a word of the death of Manou 
Dax to his good wife and neighbors. 


142 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


‘‘ You met that poor saiut and killed her in the snow 
with your witcheries I” one cried. 

“ You have stifled that poor babe where it lay I” cried 
another. 

“ A good woman like that shrieked a third, “ who 
was well and blithe and praising God only a day ago, for 
I saw her myself come down the hill for our well water !” 

“ It is as you did with the dear little Remy, who will 
be lame all his life through you,’’ hissed a fourth. “ You 
are not fit to live ; you spit venom like a toad.” 

“ Are you alive, my angels ?” said a fifth, waking the 
three children noisily, and rousing their piercing cries. 

Are you alive after that witch has gazed on you ? It 
is a miracle ! The saints be praised 1” 

Folle-Farine stood mute and erect for the moment, not 
comprehending why they thus with one accord fell upon 
her. She pointed to the bodies on the hearth, with one 
of those grave and dignified gestures which were her 
birthright. 

“ She was cold and hungry,” she said curtly, her mel- 
low accent softening and enriching the provincial tongue 
which she had learned from those amidst whom she dwelt. 
“ She had fallen, and was dying. I brought her here. 
The young child was killed by the snow. I stayed with 
the rest because they were frightened, and alone. There 
is no more to tell. What of it4”’ 

“ Thou hadst better come away. What canst thou 
prove ?” whispered Flandrin to his wife. 

He was afraid of the storm he had invoked, and would 
fain have stilled it. But that was beyond his power. 
The women had not come forth half a league in the howl- 
ing winds of a midwinter daybreak only to go back with 
a mere charity done, and with no vengeance taken. 

They hissed, they screamed, they hurled their rage at 
her ; they accused her of a thousand crimes ; they filled 
the hut with clamor as of a thousand tongues ; they 
foamed, they spat, they struck at her with their sticks ; 
and she stood quiet, looking at them, and the old dead 
face of Manon Hax lay upward in the dim light. 

The eldest boy struggled in the grasp of the peasant 
woman who had seized him, and stretched his arms, in- 


FOLLE-FARINE, 


143 


stead, to the one who had fed him and whose hand he 
had held all through his restless slumber in that long and 
dreary night. 

The woman covered his eyes with a scream. 

“ Ah — h I” she moaned, “ see how the innocent child 
is bewitched I It is horrible I” 

“ Look on that; — oh, infernal thing 1” cried Flandrin’s 
wife, lifting up her treasured figure of Peter. “ You dare 
not face that blessed image. See — see all of you — how 
she winces, and turns white 1” 

Folle-Farine had shrunk a little as the child had called 
her. Its gesture of affection was the first that she had 
ever seen towards her in any human thing. 

She laughed aloud as the image of Peter was thrust in 
her face. She saw it was some emblem and idol of their 
faith, devoutly cherished. She stretched her hand out, 
wrenched it away, trampled on it, and tossed it through 
the doorway into the snow, where it sank and disap- 
peared. Then she folded her arms, and waited for them. 

There was a shriek at the blasphemy of the impious 
act ; then they rushed on her. 

They came inflamed with all the fury which abject fear 
and bigoted hatred can beget in minds of the lowest and 
most brutal type. They were strong, rude, ignorant, 
fanatical peasants, and they abhorred her, and they 
believed no child of theirs to be safe in its bed while she 
walked alive abroad. Beside such women, when in 
wrath and riot, the tiger and the hyena are as the lamb 
and the dove. 

They set on her with furious force ; they flung her, they 
trod on her, they beat her, they kicked her with their 
wood-shod feet, with all the malignant fury of the female 
animal that fights for its offspring’s and its own security. 

Strong though she was, and swift, and full of courage, 
she had no power against the numbers who had thrown 
themselves on her, and borne her backward by dint of 
their united effort, and held her down to work their worst 
on her. She could not free herself to return their blows, 
nor lift herself to wrestle with them ; she could only deny 
them the sweetness of wringing from her a single cry, 
and that she did. She was mute while the rough hands 


144 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


flew at her, the sticks struck at her, the heavy feet were 
driven against her body, and the fierce fingers clutched 
at her hair, and twisted and tore it, — she was quite mute 
throughout. 

“ Prick her in the breast, and see if the devil be still in 
her. I have heard say there is no better way to test a 
witch 1” cried Flandrin’s wife, writhing in rage for the 
outrage to the Petrus. 

Her foes needed no second bidding ; they had her 
already prostrate in their midst, and a dozen eager, vio- 
lent hands seized a closer grip upon her, pulled her 
clothes from her chest, and, holding her down on the 
mud floor, searched with ravenous eyes for the signet 
marks of hell. The smooth, soft skin baffled them ; its 
rich and tender hues were without spot or blemish. 

“What matter, — what matter?” hissed Rose Flandrin. 
“ When our fathers hunted witches in the old time, did 
they stop for that? Draw blood, and you will see.” 

She clutched a jagged, rusty nail from out the wall, and 
leaned over her prey. 

“ It is the only babe that will ever cling to thee !” she 
cried, with a laugh, as the nail drew blood above the 
heart. 

Still Folle-Farine made no sound and asked no mercy. 
She was powerless, defenseless, flung on her back amidst 
her tormentors, fastened down by treading feet and 
clinching hands ; she could resist in nothing, she could 
not stir a limb; still she kept silence, and her proud 
eyes looked unquailing into the hateful faces bent to 
hers. 

The muscles and nerves of her body quivered with a 
mighty pang, her chest heaved with the torture of indig- 
nity, her heart fluttered like a wounded bird, — not at the 
physical pain, but at the shame of these women’s gaze, 
the loathsome contact of their hands. 

The iron pierced deeper, but they could not make her 
speak. Except for her eyes, which glowed with a dusky 
fire as they glanced to and fro, seeking escape, she might 
have been a statue of olive-wood, flung down by ruffians 
to make a bonfire. 

“ If one were to drive the nail to the head, she would 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


145 


not feel !” cried the women, in furious despair, and were 
minded, almost, to put her to that uttermost test. 

Suddenly, from the doorway, Flandrin raised an 
alarm : 

“ There is our notary close at hand, on the road on his 
mule I Hist! Come out quickly ! You know how strict 
he is, and how he forbids us ever to try and take the law 
into our own keeping. Quick — as you love your lives — 
quick!” 

The furies left their prey, and scattered and fled; the 
notary was a name of awe to them, for he was a severe 
man but just. 

They seized the children, went out with them into the 
road, closed the hut door behind them, and moved down 
the hill, the two younger wailing sadly, and the eldest 
trying to get from them and go back. 

The women looked mournful and held their heads 
down, and comforted the little ones; Flandrin himself 
went to his cattle in the meadow. 

“Is anything amiss?” the old white-haired notary 
asked, stopping his gray mule at sight of the little caval- 
cade. 

The women, weeping, told him that Manon Dax was 
dead, and the youngest infant likewise — of cold, in the 
night, as they supposed. They dared to say no more, 
for he had many times rebuked them for their lack of 
charity and their bigoted cruelties and superstitions, and 
they were quaking with fear lest he should by any chance 
enter the cottage and see their work. 

“ Flandrin, going to his cow, saw her first, and he came 
to us and told us,” they added, crossing themselves fer- 
vently, and hushing little Bernardou, who wanted to get 
from them and return; “ and we have taken the poor 
little things to carry them home; we are going to give 
them food, and warm them awhile by the stove, and then 
we shall come back and do all that is needful for the be- 
loved dead who are within.” 

“ That is well. That is good and neighborly of you,” 
said the notary, who liked them, having married them 
all, and registered all their children’s births, and who was 
a good old man, though stern. 

13 


146 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


He promised them to see for his part that all needed by 
the law and by the church should be done for their old 
lost neighbor ; and then he urged his mule into a trot, 
for he had been summoned to a rich man’s .sick-bed in 
that early winter morning, and was in haste lest the 
priest should be beforehand with him there. 

“ How tender the poor are to the poor ! Those people 
have not bread enough for themselves, and yet they 
burden their homes with three strange mouths. Their 
hearts must be true at the core, if their tongues some- 
times be foul,” he mused, as he rode the mule down 
through the fog. 

The women went on, carrying and dragging the chil- 
dren with them, in a sullen impatience. 

“ To think we should have had to leave that fiend of 
Ypres!”they muttered in their teeth. “ Well, there is 
one thing, she will not get over the hurt for days. Her 
bones will be stiff for many a week. That will teach 
her to leave honest folk alone.” 

And they traversed the road slowly, muttering to one 
another. 

“ Hold thy noise, thou little pig !” cried Flandrin’s wife, 
pushing Bernardou on before her. “ Hold thy noise, I 
tell you, or I will put you in the black box in a hole in 
the ground, along with thy great-grandmother.” 

But Bernardou wept aloud, refusing to be comforted or 
terrified into silence. He was old enough to know that 
never more would the old kindly withered brown face 
bend over him as he woke in the morning, nor the old 
kindly quavering voice croon him country ballads and 
cradle songs at twilight by the bright wood fire. 

Little by little the women carrying the children crept 
down the slippery slope, half ice and half mud in the 
thaw, and entered their own village, and therein were 
i^uch praised for their charity and courage. 

"^For when they praise, as when they abuse, villages are 
loud of voice and blind of eye almost as much as are the 
cities. 

Their tongues and those of their neighbors clacked all 
day long, noisily and bravely, of their good and their 
great deeds ; they had all the sanctity of martyrdom, and 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


14t 


all the glory of victory, in one. True, they have left all 
their house and field-work half done. “ But the Holy Peter 
will finish it in his own good time, and avenge himself 
for his outrage,” mused the wife of Flandrin, sorrowing 
over her lost Petrus in the snowdrift, and boxing the 
ears of little Bernardou to make him cease from his weep- 
ing, where he was huddled in her chimney corner. 

When they went back with their priest at noon to the 
hut of old Manon Dax to make her ready for her burial, 
they trembled inwardly lest they should find their victim 
there, and lest she should lift up her voice in accusation 
against them. Their hearts misgave them sorely. Their 
priest, a cobbler’s son, almost as ignorant as themselves, 
save that he could gabble a few morsels of bad Latin, 
would be, they knew, on their side; but they were sen- 
sible that they had let their fury hurry them into acts 
that could easily be applauded by their neighbors, but not 
so easily justified to the law. 

For the law is overgood,” said Rose Flandrin, “ and 
takes the part of all sorts of vile creatures. It will 
protect a rogue, a brigand, a bullock, a dog, a witch, 
a devil — anything, — except now and then an honest 
woman.” 

But their fears were groundless ; she was gone ; the 
hut when they entered it had no tenants, except the life- 
less famished bodies of the old grandam and the year-old 
infant. 

When Folle-Farine had heard the hut door close, and 
the steps of her tormentors die away down the hill, she 
had tried vainly several times to raise herself from the 
floor, and had failed. 

She had been so suddenly attacked and flung down 
and trampled on, that her brain had been deadened, and 
her senses had gone, for the first sharp moment of the 
persecution. 

As she lifted herself slowly, and staggered to her feet, 
and saw the blood trickle where the nail had pierced her 
breast, she understood what had happened to her ; her 
face grew savage and dark, her eyes fierce and lustful, 
like the eyes of some wild beast rising wounded in his 
lair. 


148 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


It was not for the hurt she cared ; it was the shame of 
defeat and outrage that stung her like a whip of asps. 

She stood awhile looking at the face of the woman she 
had aided. 

‘‘ I tried to help you,” she thought. “ I was a fool. 
1 might have known how they pay any good done to 
them.” 

She was not surprised ; her mind had been too dead- 
ened by a long course of ill usage to feel any wonder at 
the treatment she had been repaid with. 

She hated them with the mute unyielding hatred of 
her race, but she hated herself more because she had 
yielded to the softness of sorrow and pity for any human 
thing ; and more still because she had not been armed 
and on her guard, and had suffered them to prevail and 
to escape without her vengeance. 

“ I will never come out without a knife in my girdle 
again,” she thought — this was the lesson that her charity 
had brought her as its teaching. 

She went out hardening her heart, as she crept through 
the doorway into the snow and the wind, so that she 
should not leave one farewell word or token of gentleness 
with the dead, that lay there so tranquil on the ashes of 
the hearth. 

“ She lied even in her last breath,” thought Follc- 
Farine. “ She said that her God was good !” 

She could hardly keep on her own homeward way. All 
her limbs were stilF and full of pain. The wound in her 
chest was scarcely more than skin deep, yet it smarted 
sorely and bled still. Her brain was dull, and her ears 
fdled with strange noises from the force with which she 
had been flung backward on her head. 

She had given her sheepskin to the children, as before 
her Phratos had done ; and the peasants had carried the 
youngest of them away in it. The sharpness of the in- 
tense cold froze the blood in her as she crawled through 
a gap in the poplar hedge, and under the whitened bram- 
bles and grasses beyond, to get backward to the mill by 
the path that ran through the woods and pastures. 

The sun ,had risen, but was obscured by fog, through 
which it shed a dull red ray here and there above the 
woods in the east. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


149 


It was a bitter morning, and the wind, though it had 
abated, was still rough, and drove the snow in clouds of 
powder hither and thither over the fields. She could 
only move very slowly ; the thorns tearing her, the snow 
blinding her, the icicles lacerating her bare feet as she 
moved. 

She wondered, dimly, why she lived. It seemed to 
her that the devil when he had made her, must have made 
her out of sport and cruelty, and then tossed her into the 
world to be a scapegoat and a football for any creature 
that might need one. 

That she might end her own life never occurred to her ;• 
her intelligence was not awake enough to see that she 
need not bear its burden one hour more, so long as there 
was one pool in the woods deep enough to drown her 
under its green weeds and lily leaves any cool summer 
night ; or that she had but to lie down then and there, 
where she was, on the snow, beneath the ice-dropping 
trees, and let the sleep that weighed on her eyelids come, 
dreamless and painless, and there would be an end of all 
for her, as for the frozen rabbits and the birds that-^_ 
strewed the upland meadows, starved and stiff. 

She did not know ; — and had she known, wretched 
though existence was to her, death would not have 
allured her. She saw that the dead might be slapped on 
their cheek, and could not lift their arm to strike again — 
a change that would not give her vengeance could have 
had no sweetness and no succor for her. The change she 
wanted was to live, and not to die. 

By tedious and painful efforts, she dragged herself home 
by the way of the lanes and pastures ; hungry, lame, 
bleeding, cold and miserable, her eyes burning like flame, 
her hands and her head hot with fever. 

She made her way into the mill-yard and tried to com- 
mence her first morning’s work ; the drawing of water 
from the well for the beasts and for the house, and the 
sweeping down of the old wide court round which the 
sheds and storehouses ran. 

She never dreamed of asking either for food or pity, 
either for sympathy or remission of her labors. 

She set to work at once, but for the only time since 
13 * 


150 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


Phratos had brought her thither the strength and vigor 
of her frame had been beaten. 

She was sick and weak; her hand sank off the handle 
of the windlass ; and she dropped stupidly on the stone 
edge of the well, and sat there leaning her head on her 
hands. 

‘ The mastiff came and licked her face tenderly. The 
pigeons left the meal flung to them on the snow, and 
flew merrily about her head in pretty fluttering caresses. 
The lean cat came and rubbed its cheek softly against 
her, purring all the while. 

* The woman Pitchou saw her, and she called out of the 
window to her master, — 

“ Flamma ! there is thy gad-about, who has not been 
abed all night.” 

The old man heard, and came out of his mill to the 
well in the courtyard. 

“Where hast been ?” he asked sharply of her. “Pitchou 
says thou hast not lain in thy bed all night long. Is it 
so ?” 

Folle-Farine lifted her head slowly, with a dazed stupid 
pain in her eyes. 

“ Yes, it is true,” she answered, doggedly. 

“And where hast been, then?” he asked, through 
his clinched teeth ; enrnged that his servant had been 
quicker of eye and of ear than himself. 

A little of her old dauntless defiance gleamed in her 
face through its stupor and languor, as she replied to him 
with effort in brief phrases, — 

“ I went after old Manon Dax, to give her my supper. 
She died in the road, and 1 carried her home. The 
youngest child was dead too. I stayed there because the 
children were alone ; 1 called to Flandrin and told him ; 
he came with his wife and other women, and they said I 
had killed old Dax ; they set on me, and beat me, and 
pricked me for a witch. It is no matter. But it made 
me late.” 

In her glance upward, even in the curtness of her 
words, there was an unconscious glimmer of appeal, — a 
vague fancy that for once she might, perhaps, meet with 
approval and sympathy, instead of punishment and con- 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


151 


tempt. She had never heard a kind word from him, nor 
one of any compassion, and yet a dim, unuttered hope 
was in her heart that for once he might condemn her 
persecutors and pardon her. 

But the hope was a vain one, like all which she had ‘ 
cherished since first the door of the mill-house had opened 
to admit her. 

Flamma only set his teeth tighter. In his own soul 
he had been almost ashamed of his denial to his old 
neighbor, and had almost feared that it would lose him 
the good will of that good heaven which had sent him so 
mercifully such a sharp year of famine to enrich him. 
Therefore, it infuriated him to think that this offspring of 
a foul sin should have had pity and charity where he had 
lacked them. 

He looked at her and saw, with grim glee, that she 
was black and blue with bruises, and that the linen 
which she held together across her bosom had been 
stained with blood. 

“ Flandrin and his wife are honest people, and pious,” 
he said, in answer to her. “ When they find a wench 
out of her bed at night, they deal rightly with her, and 
do not hearken to any lies that she may tell them of 
feigned almsgiving to cover her vices from their sight. 

I thank them that they did so much of my work for me. 
They might well prick thee for a witch ; but they will 
never cut so deep into thy breast as to be able to dig the 
mark of the devil out of it. Now, up and work, or it will 
be the worse for thee.” 

She obeyed him. 

There, during the dark winter’s day, the pain which 
she endured, with her hunger and the cold of the weather, 
made her fall thrice like a dead thing on the snow of the 
court and the floors of the sheds. 

But she lay insensible till the youth in her brought 
back consciousness, without aid. In those moments of 
faintness, no one noticed her save the dog, who came and 
crept to her to give her warmth, and strove to wake her 
with the kisses of his rough tongue. 

She did her work as best she might ; neither Flamma 
nor his servant once spoke to her. 


152 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


“ My women dealt somewhat roughly with thy wench 
at break of day, good Flamma,” said the man Flandrin, 
meeting him in the lane that afternoon, and fearful of 
offending the shrewd old man, who had so many of 
his neighbors in his grip. “ I hope thou wilt not take 
it amiss? The girl maddened my dame, — spitting on 
her Peter, and throwing the blessed image away in a 
ditch.” 

“ The woman did well,” said Flamma, coldly, driving 
his gray mare onward through the fog ; and Flandrin 
could not tell whether he were content, or were dis- 
pleased. 

Claudis Flamma himself hardly knew which he was. 
lie held her as the very spawn of hell ; and yet it was 
loathsome to him that his neighbors should also know 
and say that a devil had been the only fruit of that fair 
offspring of his own, whom he and they had so long held 
as a saint. 

The next day, and the next, and the next again after 
that, she was too ill to stir; they beat her and called her 
names, but it was of no use ; they could not get work 
out of her ; she was past it, and beyond all rousing of 
their sticks, or of their words. 

They were obliged to let her be. She lay for nearly 
four days in the hay in her loft, devoured with fever, and 
with every bone and muscle in pain. She had a pitcher 
of water by her, and drank continually, thirstily, like a 
sick dog. With rest and no medicine but the cold spring 
water, she recovered : she had been delirious in a few 
of the hours, and had dreamed of nothing but of the old 
life in the Liebana, and of the old sweet music of Phratos. 
She remained there untended, shivering, and fever- 
stricken, until the strength of her youth returned to her. 
She rose on the fifth day recovered, weaker, but other- 
wise little the worse, with the soft sad songs of ber old 
friend the viol ringing always through her brain. 

The fifth day from the death of Manon Dax, was the 
day of the new year. 

There was no work being done at the mill ; the wheel 
stood 'Still, locked fast, for the deep stream was close 
bound in ice ; frost had returned, and the country was 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


153 


white with snow two feet deep, and bleak and bare, and 
rioted over by furious cross winds. 

Flainma and Pitchou were in the kitchen when she 
entered it; they looked up, but neither spoke to her. In 
being ill, — for the first time since they had had to do with 
her, — she had committed, for the millionth time, a crime. 

There was no welcome for her in that cheerless place, 
where scarcely a spark of fire was allowed to brighten 
the hearth, where the hens straying in from without, sat 
with ruffled feathers, chilled and moping, and where the 
old Black Forest clock in the corner, had stopped from 
the intense cold, and grimly pointed midnight, at high 
noon. 

There was no welcome for her : she went out into the 
air, thinking the woods, even at midwinter, could not be 
so lonesome as was that cheerless house. 

The sun was shiuing through a rift in the stormy 
clouds, and the white roofs, and the ice-crusted waters, 
and the frosted trees were glittering in its light. 

There were many dead birds about the paths. Claudis 
Flainma had thought their famine time a good one in 
which to tempt them with poisoned grain. 

She wondered where the dog was who never had failed 
to greet her, — a yard farther on she saw him. lie was 
stretched stiff and lifeless beside the old barrel that had 
served him as a kennel ; his master had begrudged him 
the little straw needful to keep him from the hurricanes 
of those bitter nights ; and he had perished quietly with- 
out a moan, like a sentinel slain at his post — frozen to 
death in his old age after a life of faithfulness repaid with 
blows. 

She stood by him awhile with dry eyes, but with an 
aching heart. He had loved her, and she had loved him ; 
many a time she had risked a stroke of the lash to save 
it from his body ; many a time she had sobbed herself to 
sleep, in her earlier years, with her arms curled round 
him, as round her only friend and only comrade in bond- 
age and in misery. 

She stooped down, and kissed him softly on his broad 
grizzled forehead, lifted his corpse into a place of shelter, 
and covered it tenderly, so that he should not be left to 


154 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


the crows and the kites, until she should be able to make 
his grave in those orchards which he had loved so well 
to wander in, and in which he and she had spent all their 
brief hours of summer liberty and leisure. 

She shuddered as she looked her last on him ; and 
filled in the snow above his tomb, under the old twisted 
pear-tree, beneath which he and she had so often sat 
together in the long grasses, consoling one another for 
scant fare and cruel blows by the exquisite mute sympa- 
thy which can exist betwixt the canine and the human 
animal when the two are alone, and love and trust each 
other only out of all the world. 

Whilst the dog had lived, she had had two friends ; 
now that he slept forever in the old gray orchard, she had 
but oue left. She went to seek this one. 

Her heart ached for a kind glance — for a word that 
should be neither of hatred nor of scorn. It was seldom 
that she allowed herself to know such a weakness. She 
had dauntless blood in her; she came of a people that 
despised pity, who knew how to live hard and to die 
hard, without murmur or appeal. 

Yet, as she had clung to the old mastiff, who was sav- 
age to all save herself; so she still clung to the old man 
Marccllin, who to all save herself was a terror and a 
name of foul omen. 

He was good to her in his own fierce, rugged way ; they 
had the kinship of the proscribed ; and they loved one 
another in a strange, silent, savage manner, as a yearling 
wolf cub and an aged grizzled bear might love each other 
in the depths of a forest, where the foot of the hunter 
and the fangs of the hound were alike against the young 
and the old. 

She had not seen him for six days. She felt ill, and 
weak, and cold, and alone.* She thought she would go 
to him in his hut, and sit a little by his lonely hearth, 
and hear him tell strange stories of the marvelous time 
when he was young, and the world was drunk with a 
mad sweet dream which was never to come true upon 
earth. 

Her heart was in wild revolt, and a futile hate gnawed 
ever in it. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


155 


She had become used to the indignities of the popu- 
lace, and the insults of all the people who went to and 
fro her grandsire’s place ; but each one pierced deeper 
and deeper than the last, and left a longer scar, and 
killed more and more of the gentler and better instincts 
that had survived in her through all the brutalizing de- 
basement of her life. 

She could not avenge the outrage of Rose Flandrin 
and her sisterhood, and, being unable to' avenge it, she 
shut her mouth and said nothing of it, as her habit was. 
Nevertheless it festered and rankled in her, and now and 
then the thought crossed her — why not take a flint and a 
bit of tow, and burn them all in their beds as they slept 
in that little hollow at the foot of the hill? 

She thought of it often — would she ever do it? 

She did not know. 

It had a taint of cowardice in it; yet a man that very 
winter had fired a farmstead for far less an injury, and 
had burned to death all who had lain therein that night. 
Why should she not kill and burn these also ? They had 
never essayed to teach her to do better, and when she 
had tried to do good to one of them the others had set 
on her as a witch. 

In the afternoon of this first day of the year she had 
to pass through their hamlet to seek Marcellin. 

The sun was low and red ; the dusky light glowered 
over the white meadows and through the leafless twilight 
of the woods; here and there a solitary tree of holly 
reared itself, scarlet and tall, from the snowdrifts ; here 
and there a sheaf of arrowy reeds pierced the sheets of 
ice that povered all the streams and pools. 

The little village lay with its dark round roofs, cosy 
and warm, with all the winter round. She strode through 
it erect, and flashing her scornful eyes right and left ; but 
her right hand was inside her shirt, and it gripped fast 
the handle of a knife. For such was the lesson which the 
reward for her charity had taught her — a lesson not lightly 
to be forgotten, nor swiftly to be unlearned again. 

In its simple mode, the little place, like its greater 
neighbors, kept high festival for a fresh year begun. 

Its crucifix rose, bare and white, out of a crown of fir 


156 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


boughs and many wreaths of ruddy berries. On its cabin 
windows the light of wood cracking and blazing within 
glowed brightly. Through them she saw many of their 
interiors as she went by in the shadow without. 

In one the children knelt in a circle round the fire, 
roasting chestnuts in the embers with gay shouts of 
laughter. In another they romped with their big sheep- 
dog, decking him with garlands of ivy and laurel. 

In one little brown room a betrothal party made merry ; 
in another, that was bright with Dutch tiles, and hung 
round with dried herbs and fruits, an old matron had her 
arm round the curly head of a sailor lad, home for a short 
glad hour. 

In the house of Flandrin a huge soup-pot .amoked 
with savory odor, and the eyes of his wife were soft 
with a tender mirth as she watched her youngest-born 
})laying with a Punchinello, all bells and bright colors, 
and saw the elder ones cluster round a gilded Jesus of 
sugar. 

In the wineshop, the keeper of it, having married a 
wife that day, kept open house to his friends, and he and 
they were dancing to the music of a horn and a fiddle, under 
rafters bedecked with branches of fir, with many-hued 
ribbons, and with little oil lamps that blew to and fro in 
the noise of the romp. And all round lay the dark still 
woods, and in the midst rose the crucifix; and above, on 
the height of the hill, the little old hut of Manon Dax 
stood dark and empty. 

She looked at it all, going through it with her hand on 
her knife. 

‘‘ One spark,” she thought, playing with the grim 
temptation that possessed her — “one spark oif the dry 
thatch, and what a boufire they would have for their 
feasting I” 

The thought was sweet to her. 

Injustice had made her ravenous and savage. When 
she had tried to do well aud to save life, these people had 
accused her of taking it by evil sorcery. 

She felt a longing to show them what evil indeed she 
could do, and to see them burn, aud to hear them scream 
vainly, and then to say to them with a laugh, as the 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


15t 


flames licked up their homes and their lives, “Another 
time, take care how you awake a witch !” 

Why did she not do it ? She did not know ; she had 
brought out a flint and tinder in the pouch that hung at 
her side. It would be as easy as to pluck a sere leaf; 
she knew that. 

She stood still and pla3^ed with her fancy, and it was 
horrible and sweet to her — so sweet because so horrible. 

How soon their mirth would be stilled! 

As she stood thinking there, and seeing in fancy the 
red glare that would light up that peaceful place, and 
hearing the roar of the lurid flames that would drown 
the music, and the laughter, and the children’s shouts, 
out of the twilight there rose to her a small, dark thing, 
with a halo of light round its head; the thing was little 
Bernardou, and the halo was the shine of his curling 
hair in the lingering light. 

lie caught her skirts in his hands, and clung to her 
and sobbed. 

“ I know you — you were good that night. The people 
all say you are wicked, but you gave us 3^our food, and 
held my hand. Take me back to grau’mere — oh, take 
me back!” 

She was startled and bewildered. This child had 
never mocked her, but he had screamed and run from her 
in terror, and had been told a score of stories that she 
was a devil, who could kill his body and soul. 

“ She is dead, Bernardou,” she answered him ; and her 
voice was troubled, and sounded strangely to her as she 
spoke for the first time to a child without being derided 
or screamed at in fear. 

“ Dead ! What is that ?” sobbed the boy. “ She was 
stiff and cold, I know, and they put her in a hole ; but 
she would waken, I know she would, if she only heard 
We never cried in the night but she heard in her 
sleep, and got up and came'to us. Oh, do tell her — do, 
do tell her !” 

She was silent; she did not know how to answer him, 
and the strangeness of any human appeal made to her 
bewildered her and held her mute. 

“ Why are you out in the cold, Bernardou ?” she asked 
14 


158 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


him suddenly, glancing backward through the lattice of 
the Flandrins’ house, through which she could see the 
infants laughing and shaking the puppet with the gilded 
bells. 

“ They beat me ; they say I am naughty, because I 
want gran’mhre,’^ he said, with a sob, “ They beat me 
often, and oh I if she knew, she would wake and come. 
Do tell her — do I Bernardou will be so good, and never 
vex her, if only she will come back I” 

Ilis piteous voice was drowned in tears. 

His little life had been hard ; scant fare, cold winds, 
and naked limbs had been his portion ; yet the life had 
been bright and gleeful to him, clinging to his grandam’s 
skirts as she washed at the tub or hoed ip the cabbage- 
ground, catching her smile when he brought her the first 
daisy of the year, running always to her open arms in 
any hurt, sinking to sleep al\vays with the singing of her 
old ballads on his ear. 

It had been a little life, dear, glad, kindly, precious to 
him, and he wept for it, refusing to be comforted by sight 
of a gilded puppet in another’s hand, or a sugared Jesus 
in another’s mouth, as they expected him to be. 

It is the sort of comfort that is always offered to the 
homeless, and they are always thought ungrateful if they 
will not be consoled b}^ it. 

“ I wish I could take you, Bernardou !” she murmured, 
with a momentary softness that was exquisitely tender 
in its contrast to her haughty and fierce temper. ‘‘ I 
wish I could.” 

For one wild instant the thought came to her to break 
from her bonds, and take this creature who was as lonely 
as herself, and to wander away and away into that un- 
known land which stretched around her, and of which 
she knew no more than one of the dark leaves knew that 
grew in the snow-filled ditch. But the thought passed 
unuttered : she knew neither where to go nor wfiat to 
do. Her few early years in the Liebana were too dream- 
like and too vaguely remembered to be any guide to her; 
and the world seemed only to her in her fancies as a vast 
plain, dreary and dismal, in which every hand would be 
against her, and every living thing be hostile to her. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


159 


Besides, the long habitude of slavery was on her, and 
it is a yoke that eats into the flesh too deeply to be 
wrenched off without an effort. 

As she stood thinking, with the child’s eager hands 
clasping her skirts, a shrill voice called from the wood- 
stack and dung-heap outside Flandrin’s house, — 

“ Bernardou 1 Bernardou! thou little plague. Come 
within. What dost do out there in the dark? Mischief, 
I will warrant.” 

The speaker strode out, and snatched and bore and 
clutched him away ; she was the sister of Rose Flandriu, 
who lived with them, and kept the place and the children 
in order. 

“Thou little beast I” she muttered, in Tury. “Dost 
dare talk to the witch that killed thy grandmother ? Thou 
shalt hie to bed, and sup on a fine whipping. Thank 
God, thou goest to the hospital to-morrow I Thou 
wouldst bring a dire curse on the house in reward for our 
alms to thee.” 

She dragged him in and slammed-to the door, and his 
cries echoed above the busy shouts and laughter of the 
Flandrin family, gathered about the tinseled Punch and 
the sugared Jesus, and the soup-pot, that stewed them a 
fat farm-yard goose for their supper. 

Folle-Farine listened awhile, with her hand clinched 
on her knife ; then she toiled onward through the village, 
and left it and its carols and carouses behind her in the 
red glow of the sinking sun. 

She thought no more of setting their huts in a blaze ; 
the child’s words had touched and softened her, she re- 
membered the long patient bitter life of the woman who 
had died of cold and hunger in her eighty-second year, 
and yet who had thus died saying to the last, “ God is 
good.” 

“What is their God?” she mused. “They care for 
nim, and He seems to care nothing for them whether they 
be old or young.” 

Yet her heart was softened, and she would not fire the 
house in which little Bernardou was sheltered. 

His was the first gratitude that she had ever met with, 
and it was sweet to her as the rare blossom of the edel- 


160 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


weiss to the traveler upon the highest Alpine summits — 
a flower full of promise, born amidst a waste. 

The way was long to where Marcellin dwelt, but she 
walked on through the fields that were in summer all one 
scarlet group of poppies. 

The day was over, the evening drew nigh, the sound 
of innumerable bells in the town echoed faintly from the 
distance, over the snow : all was still. 

On the night of the new year the people had a care 
that the cattle in the byres, the sheep in the folds, the 
dogs in the kennels, the swine in the styes, the old cart- 
horses in the sheds, should have a full meal and a clean 
bed, and be able to rejoice. 

In all the Country round thefe were only two that were 
forgotten — the dead in their graves and the daughter of 
Taric the gypsy. 

Folle-Farine was cold, hungry, and exhausted, for the 
fever had left her enfeebled; and from the coarse food of 
the mill-house her weakness had turned. 

But she walked on steadily. 

At the hut where Marcellin dwelt she knew that she 
would be sure of one welcome, one smile ; one voice that 
would greet her kindly ; one face that would look on her 
without a frown. 

It would not matter, she thought, how the winds 
should howl and the hail drive, or how the people should 
be merry in their homes and forgetful of her and of him. 
He and she would sit together over the little fire, and 
give back hate for hate and scorn for scorn, and commune 
with each other, and want no other cheer or comrade. 

It had been always so since he had first met her 
at sunset among the poppies, then a little child eight 
years old. Every new-year’s-night she had spent with 
him in his hovel ; and in their own mute way they had 
loved one another, and drawn closer together, and been 
almost glad, though often pitcher and platter had been 
empty, and sometimes even the hearth had been cold. 

She stepped bravely against the wind, and over the 
crisp firm snow, her spirits rising as she drew near the 
only place that had ever opened its door gladly to her 
coming, her heart growing lighter as she approache(l the 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


161 


only creature to whom she had ever spoken her thoughts 
without derision or told her woes without condemnation. 

Ilis hut stood by itself in the midst of the wide pastures 
and by the side of a stream. 

A little light was wont to twinkle at that hour through 
the crevices of its wooden shutter ; this evening all was 
dark, the outline of the hovel rose like a rugged mound 
against the white wastes round it. The only sound was 
the far-off chiming of the bells that vibrated strangely 
on the rarefied sharp air. 

She crossed the last meadow where the sheep were 
folded for the night, and went to the door and pushed 
against it to open it — it was locked. 

She struck it with her hand. 

“ Open, Marcellin — open quickly. It is only I.’’ 

There was no answer. 

She smote the wood more loudly, and called to him 
again. 

A heavy step echoed on the mud floor within ; a match 
was struck, a dull light glimmered ; a voice she did not 
know muttered drowsily, “ Who is there 

“ It is I, Marcellin,” she answered. “ It is not night. 
I am come to be an hour with you. Is anything amiss V 

The door opened slowly, an old woman, whose face 
was strange to her, peered out into the dusk. She had 
been asleep on the settle by the fire, and stared stupidly 
at the flame of her own lamp. 

“ Is it the old man, Marcellin, you want ?” she asked. 

“Marcellin, yes — where is he?” 

“ He died four days ago. Get you gone ; I will have 
no tramps about my place.” 

“ Died I” 

Folle-Farine stood erect and without a quiver in her 
face and in her limbs ; but her teeth shut together like a 
steel clasp, and all the rich and golden hues of her skin 
changed to a sickly ashen pallor. 

“Yes, wdiy not?” grumbled the old woman. “To be 
sure, men said that God would never let him die, because 
he killed St. Louis ; but I myself never thought that. I 
knew the devil would not wait more than a hundred 
years for him — you can never cheat the devil, and he 

14 * 


162 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


always seems stronger than the saints — somehow. You 
are that thing of Ypres, are you not ? Get you gone I’^ 

“ Who are you ? Why are you here V' she gasped. 

Her right hand was clinched on the door-post, and her 
right foot was set on the threshold, so that the door could 
not be closed. 

“ I am an honest woman and a pious ; and it befouls 
me to dwell where he dwelt,’’ the old peasant hissed in 
loud indignation. “ I stood out a whole day ; but when 
one is poor, and the place is offered quit of rent, what 

can one do ? -and it is roomy and airy for the fowls, 

and the priest has flung holy water about it and purified 
it, and I have a Horseshoe nailed up and a St. John in 
the corner. But be off with you, and take your foot 
from my door I” 

Folle-Farine stood motionless. 

“ When did he die, and how ?” she asked in her teeth. 

“ He was found dead on the road, on his heap of stones, 
the fourth night from this,” answered the old woman, 
h)ving 10 hear her own tongue, yet dreading the one to 
wiiom she spoke. “ Perhaps he had been hungered, I do 
not know; or more likely the devil would not wait any 
longer — anyways he was dead, the hammer in his hand. 
Max Lieben, the man that travels with the wooden clocks, 
found him. He lay there all night. Nobody would touch 
him. They say they saw the mark of the devil’s claws 
on him. At last they got a dung-cart, and that took him 
away before the sun rose. He died just under the great 
Calvary — it was like his blasphemy. They have put him 
in the common ditch. I think it shame to let the man 
that slew a saint be in the same grave with all the poor 
honest folk who feared God, and were Christians, though 
they might be beggars and outcasts. Get you gone, you 
be as vile as he. If you want him, go ask your father 
the foul fiend for him — thrby are surely together now.” 

And she drove the door to, and closed’ it, and barred it 
firmly within. 

“ Not but what the devil can get through the chinks,” 
she muttered, as she turned the wick of her lamp up 
higher. 

Folle-Farine went back over the snow; blind, sick. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


163 


feeling her way through the twilight as though it were 
the darkness of night. 

“He died alone — he died alone,” she muttered, a 
thousand times, as she crept shivering through the gloom ; 
and she knew that now her own fate was yet more 
desolate. She knew that now she lived alone without 
one friend on earth. 

The death on the open highwa}^ ; the numbness, and 
stillness, and deafness to all the maledictions of men. 

The shameful bier made at night on the dung-cart, 
amidst loathing glances and muttered curses ; the name- 
less grave in the common ditch with the beggar, the thief, 
the harlot, and the murderer, — these which were so awful 
to all others seemed to her as sweet as to sink to'sleep on 
soft unshorn grass, whilst rose-leaves were shaken in the 
wind, and fell as gently as kisses upon the slumberer. 

For even those at least were rest. And she in her 
youth and in her strength, and in the blossom of her 
beauty, gorgeous as a passion-flower in the sun, envied 
bitterly the old man who had died at his work on the 
public road, hated by his kind, weighted with the burden 
of nigh a hundred years. 

For his death was not more utterly lonely and desolate 
than was her life ; and to all taunts and to all curses the 
ears of the dead are deaf. 


BOOK III. 


CHAPTER 1. 

Night had come; a dark night of earliest spring. 
The wild day had sobbed itself to sleep after a restless 
life with fitful breaths of storm and many sighs of shud- 
dering breezes. 

The sun had sunk, leaving long tracks of blood-red 
light across one-half the heavens. 

There was a sharp crisp coldness as of lingering frost 
in the gloom and the dullness. Heavy clouds, as yet un- 
broken, hung over the cathedral and the clustering roofs 
around it in dark and starless splendor. 

Over the great still plains which stretched eastward 
and southward, black with the furrows of the scarce- 
budded corn, the wind blew hard; blowing the river 
and the many streamlets spreading from it into foam ; 
driving the wintry leaves which still strewed the earth 
thickly hither and thither in legions ; breaking boughs 
that had weathered through the winter hurricanes, and 
scattering the tender blossoms of the snowdrops and the 
earliest crocuses in all the little moss-grown garden-ways. 

The smell of wet grass, of the wood-born violets, of 
trees whose new life was waking in their veins, of damp 
earths turned freshly upwards by the plow, were all 
blown together by the riotous breezes. 

Now and then a light gleamed through the gloom 
where a little peasant boy lighted home with a torch 
some old priest on his mule, or a boat went down the 
waters with a lamp hung at its prow.. For it grew dark 
( 164 ) 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


165 


early, and people used to the river re* d a threat of a flood 
on its face. 

A dim glow from the west, which was still tinged 
with the fire of the sunset, fell through a great square 
window set in a stone building, and, striking across the 
sicklier rays of an oil lamp, reached the opposing wall 
within. 

It was a wall of gray stone, dead and lusterless like 
the wall of a prison-house, over whose surface a spider 
as colorless as itself dragged slowly its crooked hairy 
limbs loaded with the moisture of the place ; an old 
tower, of which the country-folk told strange tales where 
it stood among the rushes on the left bank of the stream. 

A man watched the spider as it went. 

It crept on its heavy way across the faint crimson re- 
flection from the glow of the sunken sun. 

It was fat, well nourished, lazy, content ; its home of 
dusky silver hung on high, where its pleasure lay in 
weaving, clinging, hoarding, breeding. It lived in the 
dark ; it had neither pity nor regret ; it troubled itself 
neither for the death it dealt to nourish itself, nor for the 
light without, into which it never wandered ; it spun and 
throve and multiplied. 

It was an emblem of the man who is wise in his genera- 
tion ; of the man whom Cato the elder deemed divine ; 
of the Majority and the Mediocrity who rule over the 
earth and enjoy its fruits. 

This man knew that it was wise ; that those who were 
like to it were wise also : wise with the only wisdom 
which is honored of other men. 

He had been unwise — always; and therefore he stood, 
watching the sun die, with hunger in his soul, with 
famine in his body. 

For many months he had been half famished, as were 
the wolves in his own northern mountains in the winter 
solstice. For seven days he had only been able to crush 
a crust of hard black bread between his teeth. For 
twenty hours he had not done even so much as this. 
The trencher in his trestle was empty ; and he had not 
wherewithal to refill it. 

He might have found some to fill it for him, no doubt. 


166 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


He lived amidst th^ poor, and the poor to the poor are 
good, though they are bad and bitter to the rich. 

But he did not open either his lips or his hand. He 
consumed his heart in silence ; and his vitals preyed in 
anguish on themselves without his yielding to their tor- 
ments. 

He was a madman ; and Cato, who measured the god- 
liness of men by what they gained, would have held him 
accursed — the madness that starves and is silent for an 
idea is an insanity, scouted by the world and the gods. 
For it is an insanity unfruitful, except to the future. And 
for the future who cares, — save the madmen themselves ? 

He watched the spider as it went. 

It could not speak to him as its fellow once spoke in 
the old Scottish story. To hear as that captive heard, 
the hearer must have hope, and a kingdom — if only in 
dreams. 

This man had no hope; he had a kingdom, indeed, 
but it was not of earth ; and in an hour of sheer cruel 
• bodily pain earth alone has dominion and power and 
wortL 

The spider crawled across the gray wall ; across the 
glow from the vanished sun ; across a coil of a dead 
passion-vine that strayed over the floor, across the classic 
^shape of a great cartoon drawn in chalks upon the dull 
rugged surface of stone. 

Nothing arrested it; nothing retarded it, as nothing 
hastened it. 

It moved slowly on ; fat, lusterless, indolent, hueless ; 
reached at length its den, and there squatted aloft, loving 
the darkness ; its young swarming around, its netted prey 
held in its forceps, its nets cast about. 

Through the open casement there came in on the rising 
wind of the storm, in the light of the last lingering sun- 
beam, a beautiful night-moth, begotten by some cruel 
hot-house heat in the bosom of some frail exiled tropic 
flower. 

It swam in on trembling pinions, and lit on the golden 

head of a gathered crocus that lay dying on the stones 

a moth that should have been born to no world save that 
of the summer world of a Midsummer Night’s Dream. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


16 T 


A shape of Ariel and Oberon ; slender, silver, purple, 
roseate, lustrous-eyed and gossamer-wing’ed. 

A creature of woodland waters and blossoming forests ; 
of the yellow chalices of kingcups and the white breasts 
of river lilies, of moonbeams that strayed through a 
summer world of shadows, and dewdrops that glistened 
in the deep-folded hearts of roses. A creature to brush 
the dreaming eyes of a poet, to nestle on the bosom of a 
young girl sleeping : to float earthwards on a falling star, 
to slumber on a lotos-leaf. 

A creature that, amidst the still soft hush of woods and 
waters, tells to those who listen, of the world when the 
world was young. 

The moth flew on, and poised on the fading crocus- 
leaves which spread out their pale gold on the level of 
the floor. 

It was weary, and its delicate wings drooped ; it was 
storm-tossed, wind-beaten, drenched with mist and frozen 
with the cold ; it belonged to the moon, to the dew, to 
the lilies, to the forget-me-nots, and the night ; and it 
found that the hard grip of winter had seized it whilst 
yet it had thought that the stars and the summer were 
with it. 

It lived before its time, — and it was like the human 
soul, which, being born in the darkness of the world- 
dares to dream of light, and wandering in vain search of 
a sun that will never rise, falls and perishes in wretched- 
ness. 

It was beautiful exceedingly ; with the brilliant tropi- 
cal beauty of a life that is short-lived. It rested a moment 
on the stem of the pale flower, then with its radiant eyes 
fastened on the point of light which the lamp thrust 
upward, it flew on high, spreading out its transparent 
wings, and floating to the flame, kissed it, quivered once, 
and died. 

There fell among the dust and cinder of the lamp a 
little heap of shrunken fire-scorched blackened ashes. 

The wind whirled them upward from their rest, and 
drove them forth into the night to mingle with the storm- 
scourged grasses, the pale, dead violets, the withered 
snow-flowers, with all things frost- touched and forgotten. 


168 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


The spider sat aloft, sucking the juices from the fet- 
tered flies, teaching its spawn to prey and feed ; content 
in squalor and in plenitude ; in sensual sloth, and in the 
increase of its spawn and ofS4:s hoard. 

He watched them both : the success of the spider, the 
death of the moth. Trite as a fable ; ever repeated as the 
tides of the sea ; the two symbols of humanity ; of the 
life which fattens on greed and gain, and the life which 
perishes of divine desire. 

Then he turned and looked at the cartoons upon the 
wall ; shapes grand and dim, the children of his genius, 
a genius denied by men. 

His head sank on his chest, his hand tore the shirt 
away from his breast, which the pangs of a bodily hunger 
that he scorned devoured indeed, but which throbbed 
with a pain more bitter than that of even this lingering 
and ignoble death. He had genius in him, and he had to 
die like a wolf on the Armorican wolds yonder westward, 
when the snows of winter hid all offal from its fangs. 

It was horrible. 

He had to die for want of the crust that beggars 
gnawed in the kennels of the city ; he had to die of the 
lowest and commonest need of all — the sheer animal need 
of food. J^avais quelque chose Id was, perhaps, the 
most terrible of all those death-cries of despair which the 
guillotine of Thermidor wrung from the lips of the con- 
demned. For it was the despair of the bodily life for the 
life of the mind which died with it. 

When the man clings to life for life’s sake, because it is 
fair and sweet, and good to the sight and the senses, there 
may be weakness in his shudder at its threatening loss. 
But when a man is loth to leave life, although it be hard, 
and joyless, and barren of all delights, because life gives 
him power to accomplish things greater than he, which 
yet without him must perish, there is the strength in him 
as there is the agony of Prometheus. 

With him it must die also : that deep dim greatness 
within him which moves him, despite himself ; that name- 
less unspeakable force, which compels him to create and 
to achieve ; that vision by which he beholds worlds be- 
yond him not seen by his fellows. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


169 


Weary of life indeed he may be; of life material, and 
full of subtlety, of passion, of pleasure, of pain ; of the 
kisses that burn, of the laughs that ring hollow, of the 
honey that so soon turns to gall, of the sickly fatigues 
and the tired cloyed hunger that are the portion of men 
upon earth. 

Weary of these he may be ; but still if the gods have 
breathed on him and made him mad, with the madness 
that men have called genius, there will be that in him 
greater than himself, which he knows — and cannot know 
without some fierce wrench and pang — will be numbed 
and made impotent, and drift away, lost for evermore, 
into that eternal Night which is all that men behold of 
death. 

It was so with this man now. 

Life was barren for him of all delight, full of privation, 
of famine, of obscurity, of fruitless travail and of vain de- 
sire ; and yet because he believed that he had it in him 
to be great, or rather because, with a purer and more im- 
personal knowledge, he believed that it was within his 
power to do that which when done the world would not 
willingly let die ; it was loathsome to him to perish thus 
of the sheer lack of food, as any toothless snake would 
perish in its swamp. 

lie stood opposite to the great white cartoons on which 
his soul had spent itself; creations which looked vague 
and ghostly in the shadows of the chamber, but in which 
he saw, or at the least believed he saw, the title-deeds of 
his own heirship to the world’s kingdom of fame. 

For himself he cared nothing ; but for them, he smiled 
a little bitterly as he looked ; 

They will light some bake-house fire to pay those 
that may throw my body in a ditch,” he thought. 

And yet the old passion had so much dominance still 
that he instinctively went nearer to his latest and best- 
loved creations, and took the white chalks up and worked 
once more by the dull sullen rays of the lamp behind 
him. 

They would be torn down on the morrow and thrust 
for fuel into some housewife’s kitchen-stove. 

15 


no 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


Wbat matter ? 

He loved them ; they were his sole garniture and treas- 
ure ; in them his soul had gathered all its dreams and all 
its pure delights: so long as his sight lasted he sought to 
feed it on them ; so long as his hand had power he strove 
to touch, to caress, to enrich them. 

Even in such an hour as this, the old sweet trance of 
Art was upon him. 

lie was devoured by the deadly fangs of long fast ; 
streaks of living fire seemed to scorch his entrails ; his 
throat and lungs were parched and choked ; and ever and 
again his left hand clinched on the bones of his naked 
chest as though he could wrench away the throes that 
gnawed it. 

He knew that worse than this would follow ; he knew 
that tenfold more torment would await him; that limbs 
as strong, and muscles as hard, and manhood as vigorous 
as his, would only yield to such death as this slowly, 
doggedly, inch by inch, day by day. 

He knew; and he knew that he could not trust himself 
to go through that uttermost torture without once lifting 
his voice to summon the shame of release from it. 
Shame, since release would need be charity. 

He knew full well ; he had seen all forms of death ; he 
had studied its throes, and portrayed its horrors. He 
knew that before dawn — it might be before midnight — 
this agony would grow so great that it would conquer 
him ; and that to save himself from the cowardice of ap- 
peal, the shame of besought alms, he would have to use 
his last powers to drive home a knife hard and sure 
through his breast-bone. 

Yet he stood there, almost forgetting this, scarcely 
conscious of any other thing than of the passion that 
ruled him. 

Some soft curve in a girl’s bare bosom, some round 
smooth arm of a sleeping woman, some fringe of leaves 
against a moonlit sky, some broad-winged bird sailing 
through shadows of the air, some full-orbed lion rising to 
leap on the nude soft indolently-folded limbs of a dream- 
ing virgin, palm-shadowed in the East; — all these he 
gazed on and touched, and looked ^gain, and changed by 


FOLLE-FARTNE. 


in 


soQie mere inward curve or deepened line of his chalk 
stylus. 

All these usurped him ; appealed to him ; were well 
beloved and infinitely sad; seemed ever in their white- 
ness and their loneliness to cry to him, — “Whither dost 
thou g:o ? Wilt thou leave us alone?” 

And as he stood, and thus caressed them with his eyes 
and touch, and wrestled with the inward torment which 
grew greater and greater as the night approached, the 
sudden sickly feebleness of long hunger came upon him ; 
the gravelike coldness of his tireless chamber slackened 
and numbed the flowing of his veins ; his brain grew 
dull and all its memory ceased, confused and blotted. He 
staggered once, wondering dimly and idly as men won- 
der in delirium, if this.indeed were death; then he fell 
backwards senseless on his hearth. 

The last glow of day died off* the wall. The wind rose 
louder, driving in through the open casement a herd of 
withered leaves. An owl flew by, uttering weary cries 
against the storm. 

On high the spider sat, sucking the vitals of its prey, 
safe in its filth and darkness ; looking down ever on the 
lifeless body on the hearth, and saying in its heart, — 
“Thou Fooll” 


CHAPTER II. 

♦ 

As the night fell, Folle-Farine, alone, steered herself 
down the water through the heart of the town, where 
the buildings were oldest, and where on either side there 
loomed, through the dusk, carved on the black timbers, 
strange masks of satyr and of faun, of dragon and of 
griffin, of fiend and of martyr. 

She sat in the clumsy empty market-boat, guiding the 
tiller-rope with her foot. 

The sea flowing in stormily upon the coast sent the 
tide of the river inland with a swift impetuous current, 
to which its sluggish depths were seldom stirred. The 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


n2 

oars rested noused in the bottom of the boat ; she glided 
down the stream without exertion of her own, quietly, 
easily, dreamily. 

She had come from a long day’s work, lading and un- 
lading timber and grain for her taskmaster and his fellow- 
farmers, at. the river wharf at the back of the town, 
where the little sea-trawlers and traders, with their fresh 
salt smell and their brown sails crisp from fierce sea- 
winds, gathered for traffic with the corn-barges and the 
egg-boats of the land. 

Her day’s labor was done, and she was repaid for it by 
the free effortless backward passage home through the 
shadows of the water-streets ; where in the overhanging 
buildings, ever and anon, some lantern swinging on a 
cord from side to side, or some open casement arched 
above a gallery, showed the dark sad wistful face of some 
old creature kneeling in prayer before a crucifix, or the 
gold ear-rings of some laughing girl leaning down with 
the first frail violets of the year fragrant in her boddice. 

The cold night bad brought the glow of -wood-fires in 
many of the dwellings of that poor and picturesque 
quarter ; and showed many a homely interior through 
the panes of the oriel and lancet windows, over which 
brooded sculptured figures seraph-winged, or carven forms 
helmeted and leaning on their swords. 

In one of them there was a group of young men and 
maidens gathered round the wood at nut-burning, the 
lovers seeking each other’s kiss as the kernels broke the 
shells in another, some rosy curly children played at 
soldiers with the cuirass and saber which their grandsire 
had worn in the army of the empire ; in another, before 
a quaint oval old-fashioned glass, a young girl all alone 
made trial of her wedding-wreath upon her fair forehead, 
and smiled back on her own image with a little joyous 
laugh that ended in a sob ; in another, a young bearded 
workman carved ivory beside his hearth, whilst his old 
mother sat knitting in a high oak chair ; in another, a 
Sister of Charity, with a fair Madonna’s face, bent above 
a little pot of home-bred snowdrops, with her tears drop- 
ping on the white heads of the flowers, whilst the sick 
man, whom she had charge of, slept and left her a brief 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


ns 

space for her own memories, her own pangs, her own 
sickness, which was only of the heart, — only — and there- 
fore hopeless. 

All these Folle-Farine saw, going onward in the boat 
on the gloom of the water below. 

She did not envy them ; she rather, with her hatred of 
them, scorned them. She had been freeborn, though now 
she was a slave ; the pleasures of the home and hearth 
she envied no more than she envied the imprisoned bird 
its seed and water, its mate and song, within the close 
cage bars. ‘ 

Yet they had a sort of fascination for her. She wondered 
how they felt, these people who smiled and span, and ate 
and drank, and sorrowed and enjoyed, and were in health 
and disease, at feast and at funeral, always together, always 
bound in one bond of a common humanity; these people, 
whose god on the cross never answered them ; who were 
poor, she knew; who toiled early and late; who were 
heavily taxed ; who fared hardly and scantily, yet who 
for the main part contrived to be mirthful and content, 
and to find some sunshine in their darkened hours, and to 
cling to one another, and in a way be glad. 

Just above her was the corner window of a very 
ancient house, crusted with blazonries and carvings. It 
had been a prince bishop’s palace; it was now the shared 
shelter of half a score of lace-weavers and of ivory- 
workers, each family in their chamber, like a bee in its 
cell. 

As the boat floated under one of the casements, she 
saw that it stood open ; there was a china cup filled with 
Ijouse-born primroses on the broad sill ; there was an 
antique illuminated Book of Hours lying open beside the 
flowers ; there was a strong fire-light shining from within ; 
there was an old woman asleep and smiling in her dreams 
beside the hearth ; by the open book was a girl, leaning 
out into the chill damp night, and looking down the street 
as though in search for some expected and thrice-welcome 
guest. 

She was fair to look at, with dark hair twisted under 
her towering white cap, and a peachlike cheek and 
throat, and her arms folded against her blue kerchief 

15 =" 


174 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


crossed upon her chest. Into the chamber, unseen by 
her, a young man came and stole across the shadows, 
and came unheard behind her and bent his head to hers 
and kissed her ere she knew that he was there. She 
started with a little happy cry and pushed him away 
with pretty provocation ; he drew her into his arms and 
into the chamber, and shut to the lattice, and left only a 
dusky reflection from within shining through the panes 
made dark by age and dust. 

Folle-Farine had watched them ; as the window closed 
her bead dropped, she was stirred with a vague, passion- 
ate, contemptuous wonder: what was this love that was 
about her everywhere, and yet with which she had no 
share ? She only thought of it with haughtiest scorn ; 
and yet 

There had come a great darkness on the river, a fierce 
roughness in the wind ; the shutters were now closed in 
many of the houses of the water-street, and their long 
black shadows fell across the depth that severed them, 
and met and blended in the twilight. The close of this 
day was stormy; the wind blew the river swiftly, and 
the heavy raw mists were setting in from the sea as the 
night descended. 

She did not heed these; she liked the wild weather 
best; she loved the rush of a chill wind among her hair, 
and the moisture of blown spray upon her face ; she loved 
the manifold fantasies of the clouds, and the melodies 
of the blast coming over the sands and the rushes. She 
loved the swirl and rage of the angry water, and the 
solitude that closed in round her with the darkness. 

The boat passed onward through the now silent town ^ 
only in one other place a light glowed through the un- 
shuttered lattices that were ruddy with light and em- 
blematic with the paintings of the Renaissance. It was 
the window of the gardener’s wife. 

At that season there could bloom neither saxifrage nor 
nasturtium ; but some green-leaved winter shrub with 
rosy-laden berries had replaced them, and made a shining 
frame all round the painted panes. 

The fair woman was within ; her delicate head rose out 
of the brown shadows round, with a lamp burning above 


FOLLE-FARTNE. 


175 


it and a little oval mirror before. Into the mirror she 
was gazing with a smile, whilst with both hands about 
her throat she clasped some strings of polished shells 
brought to her from the sea. 

“How white and how warm and how glad she is!’’ 
thought Folle-Fariue, looking upward ; and she rowed in 
the gloom through the sluggish water with envy at her 
heart. 

She was growing harder, wilder, worse, with every 
day; more and more like some dumb, fierce forest beast, 
that flees from every step and hates the sound of every 
voice. Since the night that they had pricked her for a 
witch, the people had been more cruel to her than ever. 
They cast bitter names at her as she went by; they 
hissed and hooted her as she took her mule through 
their villages, or passed them on the road with her back 
bent under some load of fagots or of winter wood. Once 
or twice they stoned her, and chance alone had saved her 
from injury. 

For it was an article of faith in all the hamlets round 
that she had killed old Manon Dax. The Flandrins said 
so, and they were good pious people who would not lie. 
Every dusky evening when the peasantry, through the 
doors of their cabins, saw the gleam of her red girdle and 
the flash of her hawk’s eyes, where she plodded on through 
the mist on her tyrant’s errands, they crossed themselves, 
and told each other for the hundredth time the tale of her 
iniquities over their pan of smoking chestnuts. 

It had hardened her tenfold ; it had made her brood on 
sullen dreams of a desperate vengeance. Marcellin, too, 
was gone ; his body had been eaten by the quicklime in 
the common ditch, and there was not even a voice so 
stern as his to bid her a good-morrow. He had been a 
harsh man, of dark repute and bitter tongue ; but in his 
way he had loved her; in his way, with the eloquence 
that had remained to him, and by the strange stories that 
he had told her of that wondrous time wherein his youth 
had passed, when men had been as gods and giants, and 
women horrible as Medea, or sublime as Iphigenia, ho 
had done something to awaken her mind, to arouse her 
hopes, to lift her up from the torpor of toil, the lusts of 


176 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


hatred, the ruinous apathy of despair. But he was dead, 
and she was alone, and abandoned utterly to herself. 

She mourned for him with a passionate pain that was 
all the more despairing, because no sound of it could ever 
pass her lips to any creature. 

To and fro continually she went by the road on which 
he had died alone ; by the heap of broken stones, by the 
wooden crucifix, by the high hedge and the cornlands 
beyond. Every time she went the blood beat in her 
brain, the tears swelled in her throat. She hated with a 
hatred that consumed her, and was ready to ripen into 
any deadly deed, the people who had shunned him in his 
life, and in his death derided and insulted him, and given 
him such burial as they gave the rotten carcass of some 
noxious beast. 

Her heart was ripe for any evil that should have prom- 
ised her vengeance ; a dull, cold sense of utter desolation 
and isolation was always on her. The injustice of the 
people began to turn her blood to gall, her courage into 
cruelty ; there began to come upon her the look of those 
who brood upon a crime. 

It was, in truth, but the despairing desire to live that 
stirred within her; to know, to^feel, to roam, to enjoy, to 
suffer still, if need be ;^but to suffer something else than 
the endless toil of the field-ox and tow-horse, — something 
else than the unavenged blow that pays the ass and the 
dog for their services. 

The desire to be free grew upon her with all the force 
and fury inherited from her father’s tameless and ever- 
wandering race ; if a crime could have made her free she 
would have seized it. 

She was in the prison of a narrow and hated fate ; and 
from it she looked out on the desert of an endless hate, 
which stretched around her without one blossom of love, 
one well spring of charity, rising in its deathlike waste. 

The dreamy imaginations, the fantastic pictures, that 
had been so strong in her in her early years, were still 
there, though distorted by ignorance and inflamed by de- 
spair. Though, in her first poignant grief for him, she 
had envied Marcellin his bard-won rest, his grave in the 
public ditch of the town, it was not in her to desire to 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


177 


die. She was too youn^, too strong, too restless, too 
impatient, and her blood of the desert and the forest was 
too hot. 

What she wanted was to live. Live as the great 
moor-bird did that she had seen float one day over 
these pale, pure, blue skies, with its mighty wings out- 
stretched in the calm gray weather ; which came none 
knew whence, and which went none knew whither ; * 
which poised silent and stirless against the clouds ; then 
called with a sweet wild love-note to its mate, and waited 
for him as he sailed in from the misty shadows where 
the sea lay ; and then with him rose yet higher and 
higher in the air ; and passed westward, cleaving the 
fields of light, and so vanished; — a queen of the wind, a 
daughter of the sun ; a creature of freedom, of victory, 
of tireless movement, and of boundless space, a thing of 
heaven and of liberty. 

The evening became night ; a night rough and cold 
almost as winter. 

There was no boat but hers upon the river, which ran 
high and strong. She left the lights of the town behind 
her, and came into the darkness of the country. Now 
and then the moon shone a moment through the storm- 
wrack, here and there a torch glimmered, borne by some 
wayfarer over a bridge. 

There was no other light. 

The bells of the cathedral chiming a miserere, sounded 
full of woe behind her in the still sad air. 

There stood but one building between her and her 
home, a square strong tower built upon the edge of the 
stream, of which the peasants told many tales of horror. 
It was of ancient date, and spacious, and very strong. 
Its upper chambers were used as a granary by the farm- 
people who owned it ; the vaulted hall was left unused 
by them, partly because the river had been known to 
rise high enough to flood the floor ; partly becftuse legend 
had bequeathed to it a ghastly repute of spirits of mur- 
dered men who haunted it. 

No man or woman in all the country round dared 
venture to it after nightfall ; it was all that the stoutest 
would do to fetch and carry grain there at broad day ; 


178 


FOLLE-FARINE 


and the peasant who, being belated, rowed his market- 
boat past it when the moon was high, moved his oar with 
one trembling hand, and with the other crossed himself 
unceasingly. 

To Folle-Farine it bore no such terror. 

The unconscious pantheism breathed into her with her 
earliest thoughts, with the teachings of Phratos, made 
her see a nameless mystical and always wondrous beauty 
in every blade of grass that fed on the dew, and with the 
light rejoiced ; in every bare brown stone that flashed to 
gold in bright brook waters, under a tuft of weed ; in 
every hillside stream that leaping and laughing sparkled 
in the sun ; in every wind that wailing went over the 
sickness of the weary world. 

For such a temper, no shape of the day or the night, no 
miracle of life or of death can have terror; it can dread 
nothing, because every created thing has in it a divine 
origin and an eternal mystery. ' ^ 

As she and the boat passed out into the loneliness of 
the country, with fitful moon gleams to light its passage, 
the weather and the stream grew wilder yet. 

There were on both sides strips of the silvery inland 
sands, beds of tall reeds, and the straight stems of poplars, 
ghostlike in the gloom. The tide rushed faster; the 
winds blew more strongly from the north ; the boat 
rocked, and now and then was washed with water, till 
its edges, were submerged. 

She stood up in it, and gave her strength to its guid- 
ance ; it was all that she could do to keep its course 
straight, and steer it so that it should not grate upon the 
sand, nor be blown into the tangles of the river reeds 

For herself she had no care, she could swim like any 
cygnet ; and for her own sport had spent hours in water 
at all seasons. But she knew that to Claudis Flamma 
the boat was an honored treasure, since to replace it 
would have cost him many a hard-earned and well-loved 
piece of money. 

As she stood thus upright in the little tossing vessel 
against the darkness and the winds, she passed the soli- 
tary building ; it had been placed so low down against 
the shore, that its front walls, strong of hewn stone, and 


FOLLE-FARINE, 


179 


deep bedded in the soil, were half submerged in the dense 
growth of the reeds and of the willowy osiers which 
grew up and brushed the great arched windows of its 
haunted hall. The lower half of one of the seven win- 
dows had been blown wide open ; a broad square case- 
ment, braced with iron bars, looking out upon the river, 
and lighted by a sickly glimmer of the moon. 

Her boat was swayed close against the wall, in a sud- 
den lurch, caused by a fiercer gust of wind and higher 
wave of the strong tide ; the rushes entangled it ; it 
grounded on the sand. There was no chance, she knew, 
of setting it afloat again without her leaving it to gain a 
footing on the land, and use her force to push it off into 
the current. 

She leaped out without a moment’s thought among the 
rushes, with her kirtle girt up close above her knees. 
She sank to her ankles in the sand, and stood to her waist 
in the water. 

But she was almost as light and sure of foot as a moor- 
gull, when it lights upon the treacherous mosses of a bog ; 
and standing on the soaked and shelving bank, she thrust 
herself with all her might against her boat, dislodged it, 
and pushed it out once more afloat. 

She was about to wade to it and spring into it, before 
the stream had time to move it farther out, when an owl 
flew from the open window behind her. Unconsciously 
she turned her head to look whence the bird had come. 

She saw the wide dark square of the opened casement; 
the gleam of a lamp within the cavern-like vastness of 
the vaulted hall. Instinctively she paused, and drew 
closer, and forgot the boat. 

The stone sills of the seven windows were level with 
the topmost sprays of the tall reeds and the willowy un- 
derwood ; they were, therefore, level with herself. She 
saw straight in ; saw, so far as the pale uncertain fusion 
of moon and lamp rays showed them, the. height and 
width of this legend haunted place ; vaulted and pillared 
with timber and with stone ; dim and lonely as a cathe- 
dral crypt ; and with the night-birds flying to and fro in 
it, as in a ruin, seeking their nests in its rafters and in the 
capitals of its columns. 


180 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


No fear, but a great awe fell upon her. She let the 
boat drift on its way unheeded ; and stood there at gaze 
like a forest doe. 

She had passed this grain tower with every day or 
night that she had gone down tlie river upon the errands 
of her taskmaster ; but she had never looked within it 
once, holding the peasants’ stories and terrors in the cold 
scorn of her intrepid courage. 

Now, when she looked, she for the first time believed 
— believed that the dead lived and gathered there. 

White, shadowy, countless shapes loomed through the 
gloom, all motionless, all noiseless, all beautiful, with the 
serene yet terrible loveliness of death. 

In their midst burned a lamp ; as the light burns night 
and day in the tombs of the kings of the East. 

Her color paled, her breath came and went, her body 
trembled like a leaf ; yet she was not afraid. 

A divine ecstasy of surprise and faith smote the dull 
misery of her life. She saw at last another world than 
the world of toil in which she had labored without sigh 
and without hope, as the blinded ox labored in the brick- 
field, treading his endless circles in the endless dark, and 
only told that it was day by blows. 

She had no fear of them — these, whom she deemed the 
dwellers of the lands beyond the sun, could not be more 
cruel to her than had been the sons of men. She yearned 
to them, longed for them ;• wondered with rapture and 
with awe if these were the messengers of her father’s 
kingdom ; if these would have mercy on her, and take 
her with them to their immortal homes — whether of 
heaven or of hell, what mattered it? 

It was enough to her that it would not be of earth. 

She raised herself upon the ledge above the rushes, 
poised herself lightly as a, bird, and with deft soundless 
feet dropped safely on the floor within, and stood in the 
midst of that enchanted world — stood motionless, gazing 
upwards with rapt eyes, and daring barely to draw breath 
with any audible sigh, lest she should rouse them, and be 
driven from their presence. The flame of the lamp, and 
the moonlight, reflected back from the foam of the risen 
waters, shed a strange, pallid, shadowy light on all the 
forms around her. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


181 


“They are the dead, surely,’’ she thought, as she stood 
among them ; and she stayed there, with her arms 
folded on her breast to still its beaiiug, lest any sound 
should auger them and betray her; a thing lower than 
the dust — a mortal amidst this great immortal host. 

The mists and the shadows between her eyes and them 
parted them as with a sea of dim and subtle -vapor, 
through which they looked white and impalpable as a 
summer cloud, when it seems to lean and touch the edge 
of the world in a gray, quiet dawn. 

They were but the creations of an artist’s classic 
dreams, but to her they seemed to thrill, to move, to sigh, 
to gaze on her ; to her, they seemed to live with that 
life of the air, of the winds, of the stars, of silence and 
solitude, and all the nameless liberties of death, of which 
she dreamed when, shunned, and cursed, and hungered, 
she looked up to the skies at night from a sleepless bed. 

They were indeed the dead : the dead of that fair time 
when all the eartli was 3'Oung, and men communed with 
their deities, and loved them, and were not afraid. When 
their gods were with them in their daily lives, when in 
every breeze that curled the sea, in every cloud that dark- 
ened in the west, in every water-course that leaped and 
sparkled in the sacred cedar groves, in every bee-sucked 
blossom of wild thyme that grew purple by the marble 
temple steps, the breath and the glance of the gods were 
felt, the footfall and the voice of the gods were heard. 

The}’’ were indeed the dead; the dead who — dying 
earliest, whilst yet the earth was young enough to sorrow 
for its heroic lives to embalm them, to remember them, 
and to count them worthy of lament — perished in their 
bodies, but lived forever immortal in the traditions of the 
world. 

From every space of the somber chamber some one of 
these gazed on her through the mist. 

Here the silver dove of Argos winged her way through 
the iron-jaws of the dark sea-gates. 

Here the white lo wandered in e.xile and unresting, for- 
ever scourged on by the sting in her flesh, as a man by 
the genius in him. 

Here the glad god whom all the woodlands loved 
16 


182 


FOLLE-FARLNE. 


played in the moonlight, on his reeds, to the young stags 
that couched at his feet in golden beds of daffodils and 
asphodel. 

Here in a darkened land the great Demeter moved, be- 
reaved and childless, bidding the vine be barren, and the 
fig-trees fruitless, and the seed of the sown furrows 
strengtl^less to multiply and fill the sickles with ripe in- 
crease. 

Here the women of Thebes danced upon Cithasron in 
the mad moonless nights, under the cedars, with loose 
hair on the wind, and bosoms that heaved and brake 
through their girdles of fawnskin. 

Here at his labor, in Pherae, the sun-god toiled as a 
slave; the highest wrought as the lowest; while wise 
Hermes stood by and made mirth of the kingship that 
had bartered the rod of dominion for the mere music 
which empty air could make in a hollow reed. 

Here, too, the brother gods stood, Hypnos, and Onef- 
ros, and Thanatos ; their bowed heads crowned with the 
poppy and moonwort, the flowering fern, and the ama- 
ranth, and, pressed to their lips, a white rose, in the old 
sweet symbol of silence ; fashioned in the same likeness, 
with the same winged feet, which yet fall so softly that 
no human ears hear their coming ; the gods that most 
of all have pity on men, — the gods of the Night and of 
the Grave. 

These she saw, not plainly, but through the wavering 
shadows and the halo of the vapors which floated, dense 
and silvery as smoke, in from the misty river. Their 
lips were dumb, and for her they had no name nor story, 
and yet they spoke to her with familiar voices. She 
knew them ; she knew that they were gods, and yet to 
the world were dead; and in the eyes of the forest-god, 
who piped upon his reeds, she saw the eyes of Phratos 
look on her with their tender laughter and their unfor- 
gotten love. 

JuVt so had he looked so long ago — so long ! — in the 
deep woods at moonrise, when he had played to the 
bounding fawns, to the leaping waters, to the listening 
trees, to the sleeping flowers. 

They had called him an outcast, — and lo ! — she found 
him a god. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


183 


She sank on her knees, and buried her face in her 
hands and wept, — wept with grief for the living lost for- 
ever, — wept with joy that the dead forever lived. 

Tears had rarely sprung to her proud, rebellious eyes ; 
she deemed them human things, — things of weakness 
and of shame; she had thrust them back and bit her lips 
till the blood came, in a thousand hours of pain, rather 
than men should see them and exult. The passion had 
its way for once, and spent itself, and passed. She rose 
trembling and pale, with her eyes wet and dimmed in 
luster, like stars that shine through rain, and looked 
around her fearfully. 

She thought that the gods might rise in wrath against 
her, even as mortals did, for daring to be weary of her 
life. 

As she rose, she saw for the first time before the cold 
hearth the body of a man. 

It was stretched straightly out on the stone floor ; the 
chest was bare ; upon the breast the right hand was 
clinched close and hard ; the limbs were in profound 
repose ; the head was lit by the white glimmer from the 
moon ; the face was calm and colorless, and full of sad- 
ness. 

In the dim strange light it looked white as marble, 
colossal as a statue, in that passionless rest, — that dread 
repose. 

Instinctively she drew nearer to him, breathless and 
allured ; she bent forward and looked closer on his face. 

He was a god, like all the rest, she thought ; but dead, 
— not as they were dead, with eyes that rejoiced in the 
light of cloudless suns, and with lips that smiled with a 
serene benignity and an eternal love, — but dead, as mor- 
tals die, without hope, without release, with the breath 
frozen on their tired lips, and bound on their hearts eter- 
nally the burden of their sin and woe. 

She leaned down close by his side, and looked on him, 
— sorrowful, because he alone of all the gods was stricken 
there, and he alone had the shadow of mortality upon 
him. 

Looking thus she saw that his hands were clinched 
upon his chest, as though their latest effort had been to 


184 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


tear the bones asunder, nnd wrench out a heart that 
ached beneath them. She saw that this was not a divine, 
but a human form, — dead indeed as the rest were, but 
dead by a man’s death of assassination, or disease, or 
suicide, or what men love to call the “ act of Heaven,” 
whereby they mean the self-sown fruit of their own faults 
and follies. 

Had the gods slain him — being a mortal — for his en- 
trance there ? 

Marcellin in legends had told her of such things. 

He was human ; with a human beauty ; which, yet 
white and cold and golden, full of serenity and sadness, 
was like the sun-god’s yonder, and very strange to her 
whose eyes had only rested on the sunburnt, pinched, 
and rugged faces of the populace around her. 

That beauty allured her ; she forgot that he had against 
her the crime of that humanity which she bated. He 
was to her like some noble forest beast, some splendid 
bird of prey, struck down by a bolt from some murderous 
bow, strengthless and senseless, vet majestic even in its 
fall. 

“The gods slew him because he dared to be too like 
themselves,” she thought, “else he could not be so beau- 
tiful, — he, — only a man, and dead?” 

The dreamy intoxication of fancy had deadened her to 
all sense of time or fact. The exaltation of nerve and 
brain made all fantastic fantasies seem possible to her 
as truth. 

Herself, she was strong; and desolate no more, since 
the eyes of the immortals had smiled on her, and bade 
her welcome there; and she felt an infinite pity on him, 
inasmuch as with all his likeness to them he yet, having in- 
curred their wrath, lay helpless there as any broken reed. 

She bent above him her dark rich face, with a soft com- 
passion on it ; she stroked the pale heavy gold of his hair, 
with fingers brown and lithe, but infinitely gentle ; she 
fanned the cold pain of his forehead, with the breath of 
her roselike mouth ; she touched him and stroked him 
and gazed on him, as she would have caressed and looked 
on the velvet hide of the stag, the dappled plumage of 
the hawk, the white leaf of the lily. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


185 


A subtle va^ue pleasure stole on her, a sharp sweet 
sorrow moved her, — for he was beautiful, and he was 
dead. 

“If they would give him back his life ?’’ she thought: 
and she looked for the glad forest-god playing on his reed 
amidst the amber asphodels, he who had the smile and the 
glance of Phratos. But she could see Pan’s face no more. 

The wind rose, the moon was hidden, all was dark save 
the flicker of the flame of the lamp ; the storm had broken, 
and the rain fell : she saw nothing now but the bowed head 
of Thanatos, holding the rose of silence to his lips. 

On her ear there seemed to steal a voice from the dark- 
ness, saying: 

“ One life alone can ransom another. Live immortal 
with us ; or for that dead man — perish.” 

She bowed her head where she knelt in the darkness ; 
the force of an irresistible fate seemed upon her ; that sac- 
rifice which is at once the delirium and divinity of her sex 
had entered into her. 

She was so lowly a thing ; a creature so loveless and* 
cursed ; the gods, if they took her in pity, would soon 
scorn her as men had scorned ; whilst he who lay dead 
— though so still and so white, and so mute and so pow- 
erless, — he looked a king among men, though the gods 
for his daring had killed him. 

“ Let him live I” she murmured. “ It’s for me, — I am 
nothing — nothing. Let me die as the Dust dies — what 
matter ?” 

The wind blew the flame of the lamp into darkness ; 
the moon still shone through the storm on to the face of 
Thanatos. 

He alone heard. He — the only friend who fails no living 
thing. He alone remained, and waited for her : he, whom 
alone of all the gods — for this man’s sake — she chose. 


16 * 


186 


FOLLE-FARINE, 


CHAPTER III. 

When the trance of her delirious imaginations passed, 
they left her tranquil, but with the cold of death seeming 
to pass already from the form she looked on into hers. 
She was still crouching by his body on the hearth ; and 
knew what she had chosen, and did not repent. 

He was dead still ; — or so she thought ; — she watched 
him with dim dreaming eyes, watched him as women do 
who love. 

She drew the fair glistening hair through her hands ; 
she touched the closed and blue veined eyelids tenderly ; 
she laid her ear against his heart to hearken for the first 
returning pulses of the life she had brought back to him. 
• It was no more to her the dead body of a man, un- 
known, unheeded, a stranger, and because a mortal, of 
necessity to her a foe. It was a nameless, wondrous, 
mystic force and splendor to which she had given back 
the pulse of existence, the light of day; which was no 
more the gods’, nor any man’s, no more the prey of 
death, nor the delight of love ; but hers — hers — shared 
only with the greatness she had bought for him. 

Even as she looked on him she felt the first faint flutter 
in his heart; she heard the first faint breath upon his lips. 

His eyes unclosed and looked straight at hers, without 
reason or luster in them, clouded with a heavy and de- 
lirous pain. 

“ To die — of hunger — like a rat in a trap !” he muttered 
in his throat, and strove to rise; he fell back, senseless, 
striking his head upon the stones. 

She started ; her hands ceased to wander through his 
hair, and touch his cold lips as she would touch the cup 
of a flower ; she rose slowly to her feet. 

She had heard ; and the words, so homely and so 
familiar in the lives of all the poor, pierced the wild 
faiths and visions of her heated brain, as a ray of the 


FOLLE-FARTNE. 18Y 

clear daybreak pierces through the purple smoke from 
altar fires of sacrifice. 

The words were so terrible, and yet so trite ; they 
cleft the mists of her dreams as tempered steel cleaves 
folds of .gossamer. 

“ To die — of hunger!” 

She muttered the phrase after him — shaken from her 
stupor by its gaunt and common truth. 

It roused her to the consciousness of all his actual 
needs. Her heart rebelled even against the newly-found 
immortal masters, since being ‘in wrath they could not 
strike him swiftly with their vengeance, but had killed 
him thus with these lingering and most bitter pangs, and 
had gathered there as to a festival to see him die. 

As she stooped above him, she could discern the faint 
earthy cavernous odor, which comes from the languid 
lungs and empty chest of one who has long fasted, almost 
unto death. 

She had known that famine odor many a time ere then ; 
in the hut of Manon Dax, and by the hedge-rows and in 
the ditches, that made the sick-beds of many another, as 
old, as wretched, and as nobly stubborn against alms; in 
times of drought or in inclement winters, the people in 
all that country-side suffered continually from the hunger 
torment; she had often passed by men and women, and 
children, crouching in black and wretched cabins, or lying 
fever-stricken on the cold stony fields, glad to gnaw a 
shred of sheepskin, or suck a thorny bramble of the fields 
to quiet the gnawing of their entrails. 

She stood still beside him, and thought. 

All light had died; the night was black with storm; 
the shadowy shapes were gone; there were the roar of 
the rushing river, and the tumult of the winds and rains 
upon the silence ; all she saw was this golden head ; this 
colorless face ; this lean and nerveless hand that rested 
on the feebly beating heart; — these she saw as she would 
have seen the white outlines of a statue in the dark. 

He moved a little with a hollow sigh. 

“ Bread — bread — bread 1” he muttered. “ To die for 
bread I” 

At the words, all the quick resource and self-reliance, 


188 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


which the hard life she led had sharpened and strength- 
ened in her, awoke amidst all the dreams and passions, 
and meditations of her mystical faiths, and her poetic 
ignorance. 

The boldness and the independence of her nature 
roused themselves ; she had prayed for him to the gods, 
and to the gods given herself for him — that was well — 
if they kept their faith. But if they forsook it? The 
blood rushed back to her heart with its old proud current; 
alone, she swore to herself to save him. To save him in 
the gods’ despite. 

In the street that day, she had found the half of a roll 
of black bread. It had lain in the mud, none claiming it; 
a sulky lad passed it in scorn, a beggar with gold in his 
wallet kicked it aside with his crutch ; she took it and 
put it by for her supper; so .often some stripe or some 
jibe replaced a begrudged meal for her at Flamma’s 
board. 

That was all she had. A crust dry as a bone, which could 
do nothing towards saving him, which could be of no more 
use to pass those clinched teeth, and warm those frozen 
veins, than so much of the wet sand gathered up from the 
river-shore. Neither could there be any wood, which, if 
brought in and lit, would burn. All the timber was green 
and full of sap, and all, for a score square leagues around, 
was at that hour drenched with water. 

She knew that the warmth of fire to dry the deadly 
dampness in the air, the warmth of wine to quicken the 
chillness and the torpor of the reviving life, were what 
were wanted beyond all other things. She had seen 
famine in all its stages, and she knew the needs and 
dangers of that fell disease. 

There was not a creature in all the world who would 
have given her so much as a loaf or a fagot ; even if 
the thought of human aid had ever dawned on lier. As 
it was, she never even dreamed of it ; every human hand 
— to the rosy fist of the smallest and fairest child — was 
always clinched against her; she would have sooner 
asked for honey from a knot of snakes, or sought a bed 
of roses in a swarm' of wasps, as have begged mercy or 
aid at any human hearth. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


189 


She knew nothing, either, of any social laws that might 
have made such need as this a public care on public alms. 
She was used to see men, women, and children perishing 
of want ; she had heard people curse the land that bore, 
and would not nourish, them. She was habituated to 
work hard for every bit or drop that passed her lips ; she 
lived amidst multitudes who did the same; she knew 
nothing of any public succor to which appeal could in 
such straits be made. 

If bread were not forthcoming, a man or a woman had 
to die for lack of it, as Manon Dax and Marcellin had 
done ; that seemed to her a rule of fate, against which 
there was no good in either resistance or appeal. 

What could she do? she pondered. 

Whatever she would do, she knew that she had to do 
quickly. Yet she stood irresolute. 

To do anything she had to stoop herself again down to 
that sort of theft to which no suffering or privation of her 
own had ever tempted her. 

In a vague fierce fashion, unholpen and untaught, she 
hated all sin. 

All quoted it as her only birthright ; all told her that 
she was imbued with it body and soul ; all saw it in her 
slightest acts, in her most harmless words ; and she al> 
horred this, the one gift which men cast to her as her 
only heirloom, with a strong scornful loathing which 
stood her in the stead of virtue. With an instinctive cyni- 
cism which moved her continually, yet to which she could 
have given no name, she had loved to see the children 
and the maidens — those who held her accursed, and were 
themselves held so innocent and just — steal the ripe 
cherries from the stalk, pluck the forbidden flowers that 
nodded over the convent walls, pierce through the bound- 
ary fence to reach another’s pear, speak a lie softly to 
the old grayheaded priest, and lend their ripe lips to a 
soldier’s rough salute, while she, the daughter of hell, 
pointed at, despised, shunned as a leper, hunted as a 
witch, kept her hands soilless and her lips untouched. 

It was a pride to her to say in her teeth, “ I am stronger 
than they,” when she saw the stolen peach in their hand, 
and heard the lying word on their tongue. It had a savage 


190 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


sweetness for her, the will with which she denied herself 
the' luxurious fruit that, unseen, she could have reached 
a thousand times from the walls when her throat was 
parched and her body empty ; with which she uttered the 
truth, and the truth alone, though it brought the blows 
of the cudgel down on her shoulders ; with which she 
struck aside in disdain the insolent eyes and mocking 
mouths of the youths, who would fain have taught her 
that, if beggared of all other things, she was at least rich 
in form and hue. She hated sin, for sin seemed to her 
only a human word for utter feebleness ; she had never 
sinned for herself, as far as she knew ; yet to serve this 
man, on whose face she had never looked before that 
night, she was ready to stoop to the thing which she al> 
horred. 

She had been so proud of her freedom from all those 
frailties of passion, and greed, and self-pity, with which 
the souls of the maidens around her were haunted ; — so 
proud, with the fierce, chaste, tameless arrogance of the 
women of her race, that was bred in their blood, and 
taught them as their first duty, by the Oriental and jeal- 
ous laws of their vengeful and indolent masters. 

She had been so proud ! — and this cleanliness of hand 
and heart, this immunity from her enemies’ weakness, 
this independence which she had worn as a buckler of 
proof against all blows, and had girded about her as a 
zone of purity, more precious than gold, this, the sole 
treasure she had, she was about to surrender for the sake 
of a stranger. 

It was a greater gift, and one harder to give, than the 
life which she had offered for his to the gods. 

She kneeled on one knee on the stone floor beside him, 
her heart torn with a mute and violent struggle ; her 
bent face dark and rigid, her straight haughty brows knit 
together in sadness and conflict. In the darkness he 
moved a little ; he was unconscious, yet ever, in that 
burning stupor, one remembrance, one regret, remained 
with him. 

That the mind of a man can be killed for the want 
of the food thrown to swine !” he muttered drearily, in 
the one gleam of reason that abode in the delirium of 
his brain. 


FOLLE-FARLNE. 


191 


The words were broken, disjointed, almost inarticulate; 
but they stung her to action as the spur stings a horse. 

She started erect, and crossed the chamber, leapt 
through the open portion of the casement, and lighted 
again without, knee-deep in water; she lost her footing 
and fell entangled in the rushes ; but she rose and climbed 
in the darkness to where the roots of an oak stump 
stretched into the stream, and, gaining the shore, ran as 
well as the storm and the obscurity allowed her, along 
the bank, straight towards Ypres. 

It was a wild and bitter night; the rushing of the 
foaming river went by her all the way; tlie path was 
flooded, and she was up to her ankles in water at every 
step, and often forced to wade through channels a foot 
deep. 

She went on straight towards her home, unconscious 
of cold, of fatigue, of her wet clinging clothes, of the 
water that splashed unseen in the black night up against 
her face as her steps sank into some shaking strip of 
marsh, some brook which, in the rising of the river, ran 
hissing and swelling to twice its common height. All 
she was sensible of was of one inspiration, one purpose, 
one memory that seemed to give her the wings of the 
wind, and yet to clog her feet with the weight of lead, — 
the memory of that white, sad, senseless face, lying 
beneath the watch of the cruel gods. 

She reached Ypr^s, feeling and scenting her way by 
instinct, as a dog does, all through the tumult of the air 
and against the force of the driving rains. She met no 
living creature ; the weather was too bad for even a 
beggar to be afoot in it, and even the stray and homeless 
beasts had sought some shelter from a ruined shed or 
crumbling wall. 

As softly as a leaf may fall she unloosed. the latch of 
the orchard, stole through the trees, and took her way, in 
an impenetrable gloom, with the swift sure flight of one 
to whom the place had long been as familiar by night as 
day. 

The uproar of wind and rain would have mufiled the 
loudest tread. The shutters of the mill-house were all. 
closed; it was quite still. Flamma and his serving 


192 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


people were all gone to their beds that they might save, 
by sleep, the cost of wood and candle. 

She passed round to the side of the house, climbed up 
the tough network of a tree of ivy, and without much 
labor loosened the fastenings of her own loft window, and 
entering there passed through the loft into the body of 
the house. 

Opening the doors of the passages noiselessly, she stole 
down the staircase, making no more sound than a hare 
makes stealing over mosses to its form. The ever-wake- 
ful lightly -sleeping ears of a miser were near at hand, but 
even they were not aroused ; and she passed down 
unheard. 

She went hardily^ fearlessly, once her mind was set 
upon the errand. She did not reason with herself, 'as 
more timorous creatures might have done, that being half 
starved as recompense for strong and continual labor, she 
was but about to take a just due withheld, a fair wage 
long overdue. She only resolved to take what another 
needed by a violence which she had never employed to 
serve her own needs, and, having resolved, went to exe- 
cute her resolution with the unhesitating dauntlessuess 
that was bred in her, blood and bone. 

Knowing all the turns and steps of the obscure passages, 
she quickly found her way to the store-chambers where 
such food and fuel as were wanted in the house were 
stored. 

The latter was burnt, and the former eaten, sparingly 
and grudgingly, but the store of both was at this season 
of the year fairly abundant. It had more than once hap- 
pened that the mill had been cut off from all communica- 
tion with the outer world by floods that reached its 
upper casements, and Claudis Flamma was provided 
against any such accidents; the more abundantly as he 
had more than once found it a lucrative matter in such 
seasons of inundation to lower provisions from his roof to 
boats floating below, when the cotters around were in 
dire need and ready to sell their very souls for a bag of 
rice or string of onions. 

Folle-Farine opened the shutter of the storeroom and 
let in the faint gray glimmer from the clearing skies. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


193 


A bat which had been resting from the storm against the 
rafters fluttered violently against the lattice ; a sparrow 
driven down the chimney in the hurricane flew up from 
one of the shelves with a twittering outcry. 

She paused to open the lattice for them both, and set 
them free to fly forth into the still sleeping world; then 
she took an old rush basket that hung upon a nail, and 
filled it with the best of such homely food as was to be 
found there — loaves, and meats, and rice, and oil, and a 
flask of the richest wine — wine of the south, of the hue of 
the violet, sold under secrecy at a high charge and profit. 

That done, she tied together as large a bundle of 
brushwood and of fagots as she could push through the 
window, which was broad and square, and thrust it out 
by slow degrees; put her basket through likewise, and 
lowered it carefully to the ground ; then followed them 
herself with the agility born of long practice, and dropped 
on the grass beneath. 

She waited but to close and refasten the shutter from 
without, then threw the mass of fagots on her shoulders, 
and carrying in her arms the osier basket, took her 
backward way through the orchards to the river. 

She had not taken either bit or drop for her own use. 

She was well used to carry burdens as heavy as the 
mules bare, and to walk under them unassisted for many 
leagues to the hamlets and markets roundabout. But 
even her strength of bronze had become fatigued; she 
felt frozen to the bone; her clothes were saturated with 
water, and her limbs were chill and stiff. Yet she 
trudged on, unblenching and unpausing, over the soaked 
earth, and through the swollen water and the reeds, 
keeping always by the side of the stream that was so 
angry in the darkness ; by the side of the gray flooded 
sands and the rushes that were blowing with a sound 
like the sea. 

She met no living creature except a fox, who rushed 
between her feet, holding in its mouth a screaming 
chicken. 

Once she stumbled and struck her head and breast 
with a dull blow against a pile of wood which, in the 
furious weather, was unseen by her. It stunned her for 

17 


194 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


the instant, but she rallied and looked up with eyes as 
used to pierce the deepest gloom as any goshawk’s ; she 
discerned the outline of the Calvary, towering high and 
weirdlike above the edge of the river, where the priests 
and people had placed it, so that the boatmen could abase 
themselves and do it honor as they passed the banks. 

The lantern on the cross shone far across the stream, 
but shed no rays upon the path she followed. 

At its foot she had stumbled and been bruised upon 
her errand of mercy ; the reflection of its light streamed 
across to the opposing shore, and gave help to a boat- 
load of smugglers landing stolen tobacco in a little creek. 

She recovered herself and trudged on once more along 
the lonely road. 

“ IIow like their god is to them 1” she thought; the 
wooden crucifix was the type of her persecutors ; of 
those who flouted and mocked her, who flung and pierced 
her as a witeh ; who cursed her because she was not of 
their people. The cross was the hatred of the world 
incarnated to her; it was in Christ’s name that Mar- 
cellin’s corpse had been cast on the dung and in the 
ditch ; it was in Christ’s name that the women had 
avenged on her the pity which she had shown to Manon 
Dax ; it was in Christ’s name that Flamma scourged her 
because she would not pass rotten figs for sweet. 

For the name of Christ is used to cover every crime, by 
the peasant who cheats his neighbor of a copper coin, as 
by the sovereign who massacres a nation for a throne. 

She left the black cross reared there against the rushes, 
and plodded on through sand and rain and flood, bearing 
her load: — in Christ’s name they would have seized her 
as a thief. 

The storm abated a little, and every now and then a 
gleam of moonlight was shed upon the flooded meadows. 
She gained the base of the tower, and, by means of the 
length of rope, let by degrees the firewood and the basket 
through the open portion of the window on to the floor 
below, then again followed them herself. 

Her heart thrilled as she entered. 

Her first glance to the desolate hearth showed her that 
the hours of her absence had brought no change there. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


195 


The gods had not kept faith with her, they had not raised 
him from the dead. 

“ They have left it all to me I” she thought, with a 
strange sweet yearning in her heart over this life that 
she had bought with her own. 

She first flung the fagots and brushwood on the hearth, 
and set them on fire to burn, fanned by the breath of the 
wind. Then she poured out a little of the wine, and 
kneeled down by him, and forced it drop by drop through 
his colorless lips, raising his head upon her as she 
kneeled. 

The wine was pure and old ; it suffused his attenuated 
frame as with a rush of now blood ; under her hand his 
heart beat with firmer and quicker movement. She broke 
bread in the wine, and put the soaked morsels to his 
mouth, as softly as she would have fed some little shiver- 
ing bird made nestless by the hurricane. 

He was not conscious yet, but he swallowed what she 
held to him, without knowing what he did; a slight 
warmth gradually spread over his limbs ; a strong shud- 
der shook him. 

His eyes looked dully at her through a film of exhaus- 
tion and of sleep. 

J ’avals quelque chose 1^ I” he muttered, incoherently, 
his voice rattling in his hollow chest, as he raised him- 
self a little on one arm. 

“J’avais quelque chose la I” and with a sigh he fell 
back once more — his head tossing in uneasiness from side 
to side. 

Amidst the heat and mists of his aching brain, one 
thought remained with him — that he had created things 
greater than himself, and that he died like a dog, power- 
less to save them. 

The saddest dying words that the air ever bare on its 
breath — the one bitter vain regret of every genius that 
the common herds of men stamp out as they slay their 
mad cattle or their drunken mobs — stayed on the blurred 
remembrance of his brain, which, in its stupor and its 
helplessness, still knew that once it had been strong to 
create — that once it had been clear to record — that once 
it had dreamed the dreams which save men from the life 


196 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


of the swine — that once it had told to the world the truth 
divested of lies, — and that none had seen, none had lis- 
tened, none had believed. 

There is no more terrible woe upon earth than the woe 
of the stricken brain, which remembers the days of its 
strength, the living light of its reason, the sunrise of its 
proud intelligence, and knows that all these have passed 
away like a tale that is told ; like a year that is spent; 
like an arrow that is shot to the stars, and flies aloft, and 
falls in a swamp ; like a fruit that is too well loved of the 
sun, and so, oversoon ripe, is dropped from the tree and 
forgot on the grasses, dead to all joys of the dawn and 
the noon and the summer, but alive to the sting of the 
wasp, to the fret of the aphis, to the burn of the drought, 
to the theft of the parasite. 

She only dimly understood, and yet she was smitten 
with awe and reverence at that endless grief which had 
no taint of cowardice upon it, but was pure as the 
patriot’s despair, impersonal as the prophet’s agony. 

For the first time the mind in her consciously awoke. 

For the first time she heard a human mind find voice 
even in its stupor and its wretchedness to cry aloud, in 
reproach to its unknown Creator : 

“I am yours! Shall I perish with the body? Whv 
have bade me desire the light and seek it, if forever you 
must thrust me into the darkness of negation ? Shall I 
be Nothing like the muscle that rots, like the bones that 
crumble, like the flesh that turns to ashes, and blow in a 
film on the winds ? Shall I die so ? I ? — the mind of a 
man, the breath of a god?” 

Time went by; the chimes from the cathedral tolled 
dully through the darkness over the expanse of the flood. 

The light from the burning wood shone redly and fit- 
fully. The sigh and moan of the tossed rushes and of 
the water-birds, awakened and afraid, came from the 
outer world on the winds that blew through the desola- 
tion of the haunted chamber. Gray owls flew in the 
high roof, taking refuge from the night. Rats hurried, 
noiseless and eager, over the stones of the floor, seeking 
stray grains that fell through the rafters from the grana- 
ries above. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


19T 


She noticed none of these ; she never looked up nor 
around ; all she heard was the throb of the delirious 
words on the silence, all she saw was the human face in 
the clouded light through the smoke from the hearth. 

The glow of the fire shone on the bowed head of 
Thanatos, the laughing ey^s of Pan ; Hermes’ fair cold 
derisive face, and the splendor of the Lykegenes toiling 
in the ropes that bound him to the mill-stones to grind 
bread for the mortal appetites and the ineloquent lips of 
men. 

But at the gods she barely looked; her eyes were bent 
upon the human form before her. She crouched beside him, 
half kneeling and half sitting: her clothes were drenched, 
the fire scorched, the draughts of the air froze her ; she 
had neither eaten nor drunk since the noon of the day ; 
but she had no other remembrance than of this life which 
had the beauty of the sun-king and the misery of the 
beggar. 

He lay long restless, unconscious, muttering strange 
sad words, at times of sense, at times of folly, but always, 
whether lucid or delirous, words of a passionate rebellion 
against his fate, a despairing lament for the soul in him 
that would be with the body quenched. 

After awhile the feverish mutterings of his voice were 
lower and less frequent ; his eyes seemed to become sen- 
sible of the glare of the fire, and to contract and close in 
a more conscious pain ; after a yet longer time he ceased 
to stir so restlessly, ceased to sigh and shudder, and he 
grew quite still ; his breath came tranquilly, his head fell 
back, he sank to a deep sleep. 

The personal fears, the womanly terrors, which would 
have assailed creatures at once less savage and less inno- 
cent never moved her for an instant. That there was any 
strangeness in her position, any peril in this solitude, she 
never dreamed. Her heart, bold with the blood of Taric, 
could know no physical fear ; and her mind at once igno- 
rant and visionary, her temper at once fierce and unselfish, 
kept from her all thought of those suspicions which would 
fall on her, and chastise an act like hers ; suspicions such 
as would have made a woman less pure and less daunt- 
less tremble at that lonely house, that night of storm, 

17 * 


19S 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


tfeat unknowa fate which she had taken into her own 
hands, unwitting and unheeding whether good or evil 
might be the issue thereof. 

To her he was beautiful, he suffered, she had saved him 
from death, and he was hers : and this was all that she 
remembered. She dealt with him as she would have 
done with some forest beast or bird that she should have 
found frozen in the woods of winter. 

His head had fallen on her, and she crouched un- 
wearied in the posture that gave him, easiest rest. 

With a touch so soft that it could not awaken him, she 
stroked the lusterless gold of his hair, and from time to 
time felt for the inaudible beating of his heart. 

Innumerable dreams, shapeless, delicious, swept 
through her brain, like the echoes of some music, 
faint yet unutterably sweet, that half arouses and half 
soothes some sleeper in a gray drowsy summer dawn. 

For the first time since the melodies of Phratos had 
died forever from off her ear she was happy. 

She did not ask wherefore, — neither of herself or of 
the gods did she question whence came this wonder- 
flower of her nameless joy. 

She only sat quiet, and let the hours drift by, and 
watched him as he slept, and was content. 

So the hours passed. 

Whilst yet it seemed night still, the silence trembled 
with the pipe of waking birds, the darkness quivered with 
the pale first rays of dawn. 

Over the flood and the fields the first light broke. From 
the unseen world behind the mist, faint bells rang in the 
coming day. 

lie moved in his sleep, and his eyes unclosed, and 
looked at her face as it hung above him, like some drooped 
rose that was heavy with the too great sweetness of a 
summer shower. 

It was but the gaze of a moment, and his lids dropped 
again, weighted with the intense weariness of a slumber 
that held all his senses close in its leaden chains. But 
the glance, brief though it was, had been conscious;— 
under it a sudden flush passed over her, a sudden thrill 
stirred in her, as the life stirs in the young trees at the 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


199 


near coming of the spring. For the first time since her 
birth she became wholly human. 

A sharp terror made her tremble like a leaf; she put 
his head softly from her on the ground, and rose, quiver- 
ing, to her feet. 

It was not the gods she feared, it was herself. 

She had never once known that she had beauty, more 
than the flower knows it blowing on the wind. She had" 
passed through the crowds of fair and market, not know- 
ing why the youths looked after her with cruel eyes all 
aglow. She had walked through them, indifierent and 
unconscious, thinking that they wanted to hunt her down 
as an unclean beast, and dared not, because her teetl^ 
were strong. 

She had taken a vague pleasure in the supple grace of 
her own form, as she had seen it mirrored in some wood- 
land pool where she had bathed amidst the water-lilies, 
but it had been only such an instinctive and unstudied 
pleasure as the swan takes in seeing her silver breast 
shine back to her, on the glassy current adown which she 
sails. 

jJsow, — as she rose and stood, as the dawn broke, beside 
him, on the hearth, and heard the birds’ first waking notes, 
that told her the sun was even then touching the edge of 
the veiled world to light, a hot shame smote her, and the 
womanhood in her woke. 

She looked down on herself q-nd saw that her soaked 
skirts were knotted above her knees, as she had bound 
them when she had leaped from the boat’s side ; that her 
limbs were wet and glistening with river water, and the 
moisture from the grasses, and the sand and shingle 
of the shore ; and that the linen of her vest, threadbare 
with age, left her arms bare, and showed through its rents 
the gleam of her warm brown skin and the curves of her 
shining shoulders. 

A sudden horror came upon her, lest he should awake 
again and see her as she was; — wet, miserable, half- 
clothed, wind-tossed like the rushes, outcast and ashamed. 

She did not know that she had beauty in her ; she did not 
know that even as she was, she had an exquisitely savage 
grace, as storm-birds have in theirs against the thunder- 


200 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


cloud and the lightning blaze, of their water-world in 
tempest. 

She felt a sudden shrinking from all chance of his 
clearer and more conscious gaze ; a sudden shy dread and 
longing to hide herself under the earth, or take refuge in 
the depth of the waters, rather than meet those eyes to 
which she had given back the light of life cast on her in 
'abhorrence and in scorn ; — and that he could have any 
other look, for her, she had no thought. 

She had been an outcast among an alien people too 
long to dream that any human love could ever fall on her. 
She had been too long cursed by every tongue, to dream 
that any human voice could ever arise in honor or in 
welcome to a thing so despised and criminal as she. 

For the gift which she had given this man, too, would 
curse her ; — that she had known when she had offered it. 

She drew her rude garments closer, and stole away with 
velvet footfall, through the twilight of the dawn ; her head 
hung down, and her face was flushed as with some great 
guilt. 

With the rising of the day, all her new joy was banished. 

With the waking of the world, all her dreams shrank 
back into secrecy and shame. 

The mere timid song of the linnet in the leafless 
bushes seemed sharp on her ear, calling on her to rise 
and go forth to her work, as the creature of toil, of exile, 
of namelessness, and of despair, that men had made her. 

At the casement, she turned and cast one long but 
lingering glance upon him where he slept; then once 
more she launched herself into the dusky and watery 
mists of the cold dawn. 

She had made no more sound in her passing than a 
bird makes in her flight. 

The sleeper never stirred, but dreamed on motionless, 
in the darkness and the silence, and the drowsy warmth. 

He dreamed, indeed, of a woman’s form half bare, 
golden of hue like a fruit of the south, blue veined and 
flushed to changing rose heats, like an opal’s fire ; with 
limbs strong and yet slender, gleaming wet with water, 
and brown arched feet all shining with silvery sands ; 
wiih mystical eyes, black as night and amorous-lidded, 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


201 


and a mouth like the half-closed bud of a flower, which 
sighing seemed to breathe upon him all the fragrance of 
dim cedar- woods shrouded in summer rains, of honey- 
weighted heather blown by moorland winds, of almond 
blossoms tossed like snow against a purple sea; of all 
things air-born, sun-fed, fair and free. 

But he saw these only as in a dream ; and, as a dream, 
when he awakened they had passed. 

Though still dark from heavy clouds, the dawn grew 
into morning as she went noiselessly away over the gray 
sands, the wet shore-paths, the sighing rushes. 

The river-meadows were all flooded, and on the oppo- 
site banks the road was impassable ; but on her side she 
could still find footing, for the ground there had a steeper 
rise, and the swollen tide had not reached in any public 
roadway too high for her to wade, or draw herself by the 
half-merged bushes, through it on the homeward tracks 
to Ypres. 

The low sun was hidden in a veil of water. The old 
convent bells of all the country-side sang through the 
mists. The day was still young ; but the life of the soil 
and the stream was waking as the birds were. Boats 
went down the current, bearing a sad freightage of slu ^p 
drowned in the night, and of ruined peasants, whose little 
wealth of stack and henhouse had been swept down by 
the unlooked-for tide. 

From the distant banks, the voices of women came 
muffled through the fog, weeping and wailing for some 
lost lamb, choked by the water in its fold, or some pretty 
breadth of garden just fragrant with snowdrops and with 
violets, that had been laid desolate and washed away. 

Through the clouds of vapor that curled in a dense 
opaque smoke from the wet earth, there loomed the dusky 
shapes of oxen ; their belled horns sending forth a pleas- 
ant music from the gloom. On the air, there was a sweet 
damp odor from soaked grasses and upturned sods, from 
the breath of the herds lowing hock deep in water, from 
the green knots of broken primrose roots sailing by on 
the brown, rough river. 

A dying bush of gray lavender swept by on the stream ; 
it had the fresh moulds of its lost garden-home still about 


202 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


it, and in its stems a robin had built her little nest; the 
nest streamed in tatters and ruin on the wind, the robin 
flew above the wreck, fluttering and uttering shrill notes 
of woe. 

Folle-Farine saw nothing. 

She held on her way blindly, mutely, mechanically, by 
sheer force of long habit. Her mind was in a trance ; 
she was insensible of pain or cold, of hunger or fever, of 
time or place. 

Yet she went straight home, as the horse being blinded 
will do, to the place where its patience and fealty have 
never been recompensed with any other thing than blows. 

As she had groped her way through the gloom of the 
night, and found it, though the light of the roadside 
Christ had been turned from her, so in the same blind 
manner she had groped her way to her own conception^ 
of honesty and duty. She hated the bitter and cruel old 
man, with a passion fierce and enduring that nothing 
could have changed; yet all the same she served him 
faithfully. This was an untamed animal indeed, that he 
had yoked to his plowshare; but she did her work loyally 
and doggedly ; and whenever she had shaken her neck 
free of the yoke, she returned and thrust her head through 
it again, whether he scourged her back to it or not. 

It was partially from the force of habit which is strong 
upon all creatures ; it was partially from a vague instinct 
in her to work out her right to the begrudged shelter 
which she received, and not to be beholden for it for one 
single hour to any charity. 

The mill was at work in the twilight when she reached it. 

Claudis Flamma screamed at her from the open door 
of the loft, where he was weighing corn for the grinding. 

“ You have been away all night long!” he cried to her. 

She was silent ; standing below in the wet garden. 

He cast a foul word at her, new upon his lips. She 
was silent all the same ; her arms crossed on her breast, 
her head bent. 

“Where is the boat? — that is worth more than your 
body. And soul you have none.” 

She raised her head and looked upward. 

“ I have lost the boat.” 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


203 


She thought that, very likely, he would kill her for it. 
Once when she had lost an osier basket, not a hundredth 
part the cost of this vessel, he had beaten her till every 
bone in her frame had seemed broken for many a week. 
But she looked up quietly there among the dripping 
bushes and the cheerless grassy ways. 

That she never told a lie he above in the loft knew by 
long proof ; but this was in his sight only on a piece 
with the strength born in her from the devil ; the devil 
had in all ages told so many truths to the confusion of 
the saints God. 

“ Drifted where 

“I do not know — on the face of the flood, — with the 
tide.” 

“ You had left it loose.” 

“ I got out to push it off the sand. It had grounded. 
I forgot it. It went adrift.” 

“ What foul thing were you at meanwhile ?” 

She was silent. 

“ If you do not say, I will cut your heart out with a 
hundred stripes 1” 

“ You can.” 

“I can ! You shall know truly that I can. Go, get 
the boat — find it above or below water — or to the town 
prison you go as a thief.” 

The word smote her with a sudden pang. 

For the first time her courage failed her. She turned 
and went in silence at his bidding. 

In the wet daybreak, through the swollen pools and the 
soaked thickets, she searched for the lost vessel ; know- 
ing well that it would be scarcely less than a miracle 
which could restore it to her ; and that the god upon 
the cross worked no miracles for her ; — a child of sin. 

For several hours she searched ; hungry, drenched 
with water, ready to drop with exhaustion, as she was 
used to see the overdriven cattle sink upon the road. 
She passed many peasants ; women on their mules, men 
in their barges, children searching for such flotsam and 
jetsam as might have been flung u})on the land from the 
little flooded gardens and the few riverside cabins that 
had been invaded in the night. 


204 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


She asked tidings of tlie missing treasure from none 
of these. What she could not do for herself, it never 
occurred to her that others could do for her. It was an 
ignorance that was strength. At length, to her amaze, she 
found it ; saved for her by the branches of a young tree, 
which being blown down had fallen into the stream, and 
had caught the boat hard and fast as in a net. 

At peril to her life, she dislodged it, with infinite labor, 
from the entanglement of the boughs ; and at scarce less 
peril, rowed on her homeward way upon the swollen force 
of the turbid river ; full against the tide which again was 
flowing inland, from the sea that beat the bar, away to 
the northward, in the full sunrise. 

It was far on in the forenoon ns she drew near the 
orchards of Yprhs, brown in their leaflessness, and with 
gray lichens blowing from their boughs, like hoary 
beards of trembling paupers shaking in the icy breaths 
of charity. 

She saw that Claudis Flamma was at work amidst his 
trees, pruning and delving in the red and chilly day. 

She went up the winding stairs, planks green and 
slippery with wet river weeds, which led straight through 
the apple orchards to the mill. 

“ I have found the boat,” she said, standing before 
him ; her voice was faint and very tired, her whole body 
drooped with fatigue, her head for once was bowed. 

He turned with his billhook in his hand. There was 
a leap of gladness at his heart ; the miser’s gladness over 
recovered treasure; but he showed such weakness neither 
in his eye nor words. 

“It is well for you that you have,” he said with bitter 
meaning. “ I will spare you half the stripes: — strip.” 

Without a word of remonstrance, standing before him 
in the gray shadow of the lichens, and the red mists of 
the morning, she pushed the rough garments from her 
breast and shoulders, and vanquishing her weakness, 
drew herself erect to receive the familiar chastisement. 

“I am guilty — this time,” she said to herself as the 
lash fell : — she was thinking of her theft. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


205 


CHAPTER lY. 

A SCORE of years before, in a valley of the far north, a 
group of eager and silent listeners stood gathered about 
one man, who spoke aloud with fervent and rapturous 
oratory. 

It was in the green Norwegian spring, when the 
silence of the winter world had given way to a million 
sounds of waking life from budding leaves and nesting 
birds, and melting torrei^ts and warm winds fanning the 
tender primrose into being, and wooing the red alpine 
rose to blossom. 

The little valley was peopled by a hardy race of herds- 
men and of fishers ; men who kept their goat-flocks on 
the steep sides of the mountains, or went down to the 
deep waters in search of a scanty subsistence. Put they 
were a people simple, noble, grave, even in a manner heroic 
and poetic, a people nurtured on the old grand songs of a 
mighty past, and holding a pure faith in the traditions of 
a great sea-sovereignty. They listened, breathless, to 
the man who addressed them, raised on a tribune of 
rough rock, and facing the ocean, where it stretched at 
the northward end of the vale; a man peasant-born him- 
self, but gifted with a native eloquence, half-poet, half- 
preacher ; fanatic and enthusiast; one who held it as 
Ins errand to go to and fro the land, raising his voice 
against the powers of the world, and of wealth, and who 
spoke against these with a fervor and force which, to the 
unlearned and impressionable multitudes that heard him, 
seemed the voice of a genius heaven-sent. 

When a boy he had been a shepherd, and dreaming in 
the loneliness of the mountains, and by the side of the 
deep hill-lakes far away from any sound or steps of 
human life, a madness, innocent, and in its way beautiful, 
had come upon him. 

He believed himself born to carry the message of grace 
to the nations; and to raise his voice up against those 
passions whose fury had never assailed him, and against 

18 


206 


FOLLE^FARINE. 


those riches whose sweetness he had never tasted. So 
he had wandered from city to city, from village to vil- 
lage ; mocked in some places, revered in others ; protest- 
ing always against the dominion of wealth, and speaking 
with a strange pathos and poetry which thrilled the hearts 
of his listeners, and had almost in it, at times, the menace 
and the mystery of a prophet’s upbraiding. 

He lived very poorly; he was gentle as a child; he 
was a cripple and very feeble ; he drank at the wayside 
rills with the dogs ; he lay down on the open fields 
with the cattle ; yet he had a power in him that had its 
sway over the people, and held the scoffers and the 
jesters quiet under the spell of^his tender and flutelike 
tones. 

Raised above the little throng upon the bare red rock, 
with the vast green fields and dim pine-woods stretching 
round him as far as his eye could reach, he preached 
now to the groups of fishers and herdsmen and foresters 
and hunters ; protesting to this simple people against the 
force of wealth, and the lust of possession, as though he 
preached to princes and to conquerors. He told them of 
what he had seen in the great cities through which he 
had wandered ; of the corruption and the vileness and 
the wantonness; of the greed in which the days and the 
years of men’s lives were spent ; of the amassing of riches 
for which alone the nations cared, so that all loveliness, 
all simplicity, all high endeavor, all innocent pastime, 
were abjured and derided among them. And his voice 
was sweet and full as the swell of music as he spoke to 
them, telling them one of the many fables and legends, of 
which he had gathered a full harvest, in the many lands 
that had felt his footsteps. 

This was the parable he told them that day, whilst the 
rude toilers of the forests and the ocean stood quiet as 
little children, hearkening with upturned faces and bated 
breath, as the sun went down behind the purple pines : 

“ There lived once in the East, a great king ; he dwelt 
far away, among the fragrant fields of roses, and in the 
light of suns that never set. 

“ He was young, he was beloved, he was fair of face and 
form; and the people as they hewed stone or brought 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


20t 


water, said among themselves, ‘Yerilv, this man is as 
a god ; he goes where he lists, and he lies still or rises up 
as he pleases ; and all fruits off all lands are culled for 
him ; and his nights are nights of gladness, and his days, 
when they dawn, are all his to sleep through or spend as 
he wills.’ But the people were wrong. For this king 
was weary of his life. 

“ His buckler was sown with gems, but his heart beneath 
it was sore. For he had been long bitterly harassed by 
foes who descended upon him as /wolves from the hills in 
their hunger, and plagued with heavy wars and with bad 
rice harvests, and with many troubles to his nation that 
kept it very poor, and forbade him to finish the building 
of new marble palaces, and the making of fresh gardens 
of delight, in which his heart was set. So he being 
weary of a barren land and of an empty treasury, with 
all his might prayed to the gods that all he touched might 
turn to gold, even as he had heard had happened to some 
magician long before in other ages. And the gods gave 
him the thing he craved: and his treasury overflowed. 
No king had ever been so rich, as this king now became 
in the short space of a single summer-day. 

“ But it was bought with a price. 

“ When he stretched out his hand to gather the rose that 
blossomed in his path, a golden flower scentless and stiff 
was all he grasped. When he called to him the carrier- 
dove that sped with a scroll of love- words across the mount- 
ains, the bird sank on his breast a carven piece of metal. 
When he was athirst and shouted to his cup-bearer for 
drink, the red wine ran a stream of molten gold. When 
he would fain have eaten, the pulse and the pomegranate 
grew alike to gold between his teeth. And at eventide 
when he sought the silent chambers of his harem, saying, 

‘ Here at least shall I find rest,’ and bent his steps to the 
couch whereon his best-beloved slave was sleeping, a 
statue of gold was all he drew into his eager arms, and 
cold shut lips of sculptured gold were all that met his 
own. 

“ That night the great king slew himself, unable any 
more to bear this agon}^ since all around him was deso- 
lation, even though all around him was wealth. 


208 


FOLLE-FARINE, 


“ Now the world is too like that king, and in its greed of 
gold it will barter its life away. . 

“ Look you, — this thing is certain : I say that the world 
will perish, even as that king perished, slain as he was 
slain, by the curse of its own fulfilled desire. 

“The future of the world is written. For God has 
granted their prayer to men. He has made them rich 
and their riches shall kill them. 

“ When all green places shall have been destroyed in the 
builder’s lust of gain: — when all the lands are but mount- 
ains of brick, and piles of wood and iron : — when there is 
no moisture anywhere; and no rain ever falls: — when 
the sky is a vault of smoke ; and all the rivers rank with 
poison : — when forest and stream, and moor and meadow, 
and all the old green wayside beauty are things vanished 
and forgotten : — when every gentle timid thing of brake 
and bush, of air and water, has been killed, because it 
robbed them of a berry or a fruit: — when the earth is one 
vast city, whose young children behold neither the green of 
the field, nor the blue of the sky, and hear no song but the 
hiss of the steam, and know no music but the roar of the 
furnace: — when the old sweet silence of the country-side, 
and the old sweet sounds of waking birds, and the old 
sweet fall of summer showers, and the grace of a hedge- 
row bough, and the glow of the purple heather, and the 
note of the cuckoo and cricket, and the freedom of waste 
and of woodland, are all things dead, and remembered of 
no man : — then the world, like the Eastern king, will perish 
miserably of famine and of drought, with gold in its stiff- 
ened hands, and gold in its withered lips, and gold every- 
where : — gold that the people can neither eat nor drink, 
gold that cares nothing for them, but mocks them hor- 
ribly : — gold for which their fathers sold peace and health, 
holiness and liberty : — gold that is one vast grave.” 

His voice sank, and the silence that followed was only 
filled with the sound of the winds in the pine-woods, and 
the sound of the sea on the shore. 

The people were very still and afraid ; for it seemed to 
them that he had spoken as prophets speak, and that his 
words were the words of truth. 

Suddenly on the awe-stricken silence an answering 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


209 


voice rang-, clear, scornful, bold, and with the eager and 
fearless defiance of youth : 

“If I had been that king, I would not have cared for 
woman, or bird, or rose. I would have lived long enough 
to enrich my nation, and mass my armies, and die a con- 
queror. What would the rest have mattered ? You are 
mad, O Preacher I to rail against gold. You flout a god 
that you know not, and that never has smiled upon you.” 

The speaker stood outside the crowd with a dead sea- 
bird in his hand ; he was in his early boyhood, he had 
long locks of bright hair that curled loosely on his shoul- 
ders, and eyes of northern blue, that flashed like steel in 
their scorn. 

The people, indignant and terrified at the cold rough 
words which blasphemed their prophet, turned with one 
accord to draw^ otf tlie rash doubter from that sacred 
audience-place, but the Preacher stayed their hands with 
a gesture, and looked sadly at the boy. 

“Is it thee, Arslan? Dost thou praise gold? — I 
thought thou hadst greater gods.” 

The boy hung his head and his face flushed. 

“Gold must be power always,” he muttered. “And 
without power what is life ?” 

And he went on his way out from the people, with the 
dead bird, which he had slain with a stone that he might 
study the exquisite mysteries of its silvery hues. 

The Preacher followed him dreamily with his glance. 

“Yet he will not give his life for gold,” he murmured. 
“For there is that in him greater than gold, which will 
not let him sell it, if he would.” 


210 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


CHAPTER V. 

And the words of the Preacher had come true ; so true 
that the boy Arslan grown to manhood, had dreamed of 
fame, and following the genius in him, and having failed 
to force the world to faith in him, had dropped down 
dying on a cold hearth, for sheer lack of bread, under the 
eyes of the gods. 

It had long been day when he awoke. 

The wood smouldered, still warming the stone cham- 
ber. The owls that nested in the ceiling of the hall were 
beating their wings impatiently against the closed case- 
ments, blind with the light and unable to return to their 
haunts and homes. The food and the wine stood beside 
him on the floor ; the fire had scared the rats from theft. 

He raised himself slowly, and by sheer instinct ate 
and drank with the avidity of long fast. Then he stared 
around him blankly, blinded like the owls. 

It seemed to him' that he had been dead ; and had risen 
from the grave. 

“ It will be to suffer it all over again in a little space, 
he muttered dully. 

His first sensation was disappointment, anger, weari- 
ness. He did not reason. He only felt. 

His mind was a blank. 

Little by little a disjointed remembrance came to him. 
He remembered that he had been famished in the cold- 
ness of the night, endured much torment of the body, 
had fallen headlong and lost his consciousness. This 
was all he could recall. 

He looked stupidly for awhile at the burning logs ; 
at the pile of Irrambles; at the flask of wine, and the 
simple stores of food. He looked at the gray closed 
window, through which a silvery daylight came. There 
was not a sound in the house ; there was only the crack- 
ing of the wood and the sharp sealike smell of the 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


211 


smoking pine boughs to render the place different from 
what it had been when he last had seen it. 

He could recall nothing, except that he had starved for 
many days ; had suffered, and must have slept. 

Suddenly his face burned with a flush of shame. As 
sense returned to him, he knew that he must have 
swooned from weakness produced by cold and hunger ; 
that some one must have seen and succored his neces- 
sity ; and that the food which he had half unconsciously 
devoured must have been the food of alms. 

His limbs writhed and his teeth clinched as the thought 
stole on him. 

To have gone through all the aching pangs of winter 
in silence, asking aid of none, only to come to this at 
last ! To have been ready to die in all the vigor of virility, 
in all the strength of genius, only to be saved by charity 
at the end I To have endured, mute and patient, the 
travail of all the barren years, only at their close to be 
called back to life by aid that was degradation I 

He bit his lips till the blood started, as he thought of 
it. Some eyes must have looked on him, in his wretched- 
ness. Some face must have bent over him in his misery. 
Some other human form must have been near his in this 
hour of his feebleness and need, or this thing could never 
have been ; he would have died alone and unremembered 
of man, like a snake in its swamp or a fox in its earth. 
And such a death would have been to him tenfold prefer- 
able to a life restored to him by such a means as this. 

Heath before accomplishment is a failure, yet withal 
may be great ; but life paved by alms is a failure, and a 
failure forever inglorious. 

So the shame of this ransom from death far outweighed 
with him the benefit. 

“ Why could they not let me be he cried in his soul 
against those unknown lives which had weighed his own 
with the fetters of obligation. “ Rather death than a 
debt I I was content to die ; the bitterness was passed. 
I should have known no more. Why could they not let 
me be 

And his heart was hard against them. They had 
stolen his only birthright — freedom. 


212 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


Had he craved life so much as to desire to live by 
shame he would soon have gone out into the dusky night 
and have snatched food enough for his wants from some 
rich husbandman’s granaries, or have stabbed some miser 
at prayers, for a bag of gold — rather crime than the debt 
of a beggar. 

So he reasoned ; stung and made savage by the scourge 
of enforced humiliation. Hating himself because, in 
obedience to mere animal craving, he had taken and 
eaten, not asking whether what he took was his own. 

He had closed his mouth, living, and had been ready 
to die mute, glad only that none had pitied him ; his 
heart hardened itself utterly against this unknown hand 
which had snatched him from death’s dreamless ease and 
ungrudged rest, to awaken him to a humiliation that 
would be as ashes in his teeth so long as his life should 
last. 

He arose slowly and staggered to the casement. 

He fancied he was delirious, and had distempered 
visions of the food so long desired. He knew that he 
had been starving long — how long ? Long enough for 
his brain to be weak and visited with phantoms. In- 
stinctively he touched the long round rolls of bread, the 
shape of the wine cask, the wicker of the basket: they 
were the palpable things of common life ; they seemed to 
tell him that he had not dreamed. 

Then it was charity? His lips moved with a curse. 

That was his only thanksgiving. 

The windows were unshuttered ; through them he 
looked straight out upon the rising day — a day rainless 
and pale, and full of cool softness, after the deluge of the 
rains. 

The faint sunlight of a spring that was still chilled by 
winter was shed over the flooded fields and swollen 
streams ; snow-white mists floated before the languid 
passage of the wind ; and the moist land gave back, as 
in a mirror, the leafless trees, the wooden bridges, the 
belfries, and the steeples, and the strange sad bleeding 
Christs. 

On all sides near, the meadows were sheets of water, 
the woods seemed to drift upon a lake ; a swan’s nest 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


213 


.was washed past on broken rushes, the great silvery 
birds beating their heavy wings upon the air, and pur- 
suing their ruined home with cries. Beyond, everything 
was veiled in the twilight of the damp gray vapor ; a 
world half seen, half shrouded, lovely exceedingly, filled 
with all divine possibilities and all hidden powers; a 
world such as Youth beholds with longing eyes in its 
visions of the future. 

“ A beautiful world 1’’ he said to himself ; and he 
smiled wearily as ho said it. 

Beautiful, certainly; in that delicious shadow; in that 
vague light ; in that cloudlike mist, wherein the earth met 
heaven. 

Beautiful, certainly ; all those mystical shapes rising 
from the sea of moisture which hid the earth and all 
the things that toiled on it. It was beautiful, this calm, 
dim, morning world, in which there was no sound except 
the distant ringing of unseen bells; this veil of vapor, 
whence sprang these fairy and fantastic shapes that cleft 
the watery air; this colorless transparent exhalation, 
breathing up from the land to the sky, in which all 
homely things took grace and mystery, and every com- 
mon and familiar form became transfigured. 

It was beautiful ; but this landscape had been seen too 
long and closely by him for it to have power left to cheat 
his senses. 

Under that pure and mystical veil of the refracted rain 
things vile, and things full of anguish, had their being; 

. — the cattle in the slaughter-houses ; the drunkard in the 
hovels; disease and debauch and famine; the ditch, that 
was the common grave of all the poor; the hospital, where 
pincers and knives tore the living nerves in the inquisi- 
tion of science ; the fields, where the women toiled bent, 
cramped, and hideous ; the dumb driven beasts, patient 
and tortured, forever blameless, yet forever accursed ; — 
all these were there beneath that lovely veil, through which 
there came so dreamily the slender shafts of spires and 
the chimes of half- heard bells. 

He stood and watched it long, so long that the clouds 
descended and the vapors shifted away, and^thepale sun- 
rays shone clearly over a disenchanted world, where roof 


214 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


joined roof and casement answered casement, and the 
figures oh the crosses became but rude and ill-carved 
daubs; and the cocks crew to one another, and the herds- 
men swore at their flocks, and the oxen flinched at the 
goad, and the women went forth to their field-work; and 
all the. charm was gone. 

Then he turned away. 

The cold fresh breath of the morning had breathed 
upon him, and driven out the dull delicious fancies that 
had possessed his brain. The simple truth was plain 
before him : that he had been seen by some stranger in 
his necessity and succored. 

He was thankless; like the suicide, to whom unwel- 
come aid denies the refuge of the grave, calling him back 
to suffer, and binding on his shoulders the discarded bur- 
den of life’s infinite weariness and woes. 

He was thankless ; for he had grown tired of this 
fruitless labor, this abortive combat; he had grown tired 
of seeking credence and being derided for his pains, 
while other men prostituted their powers to base use 
and public gain, receiving as their wages honor and 
applause; he had grown tired of toiling to give beauty 
and divinity to a world which -knew them not when it 
beheld them. 

He had grown tired, though he was yet young, and 
had strength, and had passion, and had manhood. Tired 
— utterly, because he was destitute of all things save his 
genius, and in that none were found to believe. 

“ I have tried all things, and there is nothing of any 
worth.” It does not need to have worn the imperial 
purples and to be lying dying in old age to know thus 
much in all truth and all bitterness. 

“ Why did they give me back my life?” he said in his 
heart, as he turned aside from the risen sun. 

He had striven to do justly with this strange, fleeting, 
unasked gift of existence, which comes, already warped, 
into our hands, and is broken by death ere we can set it 
straight. 

He had not spent it in riot or madness, in lewd love 
or in gambling greed ; he had been governed by great 
desires, though these had been fruitless, and had spent 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


215 


his strength to a great end, though this had been never 
reached. 

As he turned from looking out upon the swollen stream 
that rushed beneath his windows, his eyes fell upon the 
opposite wall, where the white shapes of his cartoons 
were caught by the awakening sun. 

The spider had drawn his dusty trail across them ; the 
rat had squatted at their feet; the darkness of night had 
enshrouded and defaced them ; yet with the morning 
they arose, stainless, noble, undefiled. 

Among them there was one colossal form, on which 
the sun poured with its full radiance. 

This was the form of a captive grinding at a mill- 
stone ; the majestic symmetrical supple form of a man 
who was also a god. 

In his naked limbs there was a supreme power ; in 
his glance there was a divine command ; his head was 
lifted as though no yoke could ever lie on that proud 
neck ; his foot seemed to spurn the earth as though no 
mortal tie had ever bound him to the sod that human 
steps bestrode : yet at the corn-mill he labored, grind- 
ing wheat like the patient blinded oxen that toiled beside 
him. 

For it was the great Apollo in Pherae. 

The hand which awoke the music of the spheres had 
been blood-stained with murder ; the beauty which had 
the light and luster of the sun had been darkened with 
passion and with crime ; the will which no other on earth 
or in heaven could withstand had been bent under the 
chastisement of Zeus. 

He whose glance had made the black and barren slopes 
of Delos to laugh with fruitfulness and gladness, — he 
whose prophetic sight beheld all things past, present, and 
to come, the fate of all unborn races, the doom of all un- 
spent ages, — he, the Far-Striking King, labored here 
beneath the curse of crime, greatest of all the gods, and 
yet a slave. 

In all the hills and vales of Greece his lo paean sounded 
still. 

Upon his holy mountains there still arose the smoke 
of fires of sacrifice. 


216 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


With dance and song the Delian maidens still hailed 
the divinity of Leto’s son. 

The waves of the pure Ionian air still rang forever 
with the name of Delphinios. 

At Pytho and at Claims, in Lycia and in Phokis, his 
oracles still breathed forth upon their fiat terror or hope 
into the lives of men ; and still in all the virgin forests 
of the world the wild beasts honored him wheresoever 
they wandered, and tlie lion and the boar came at his 
bidding from the deserts to bend their free necks and 
their wills of fire meekly to bear his yoke in Thessaly. 

Yet he labored here at the corn-mill of Admetns ; and 
watching him at his bondage there stood the slender, 
slight, wing-footed Hermes, with a slow mocking smile 
upon his knavish lips, and a jeering scorn in his keen 
eyes, even as though he eried : 

“ O brother, who would be greater than 1 1 For what 
hast thou bartered to me the golden rod of thy wealth, 
and thy dominion over the flocks and the herds ? For 
seven chords strung on a shell — for a melody not even 
thine own 1 For a lyre outshone by my syrinx hast thou 
sold all thine empire to me I Will human ears give heed 
to thy song, now thy scepter has passed to my hands ? 
Immortal music only is left thee, and the vision foresee- 
ing the future. 0 god ! 0 hero ! 0 fool I what shall 
these profit thee now?” 

Thus to the artist by whom they had been begotten 
the dim white shapes of the deities spoke. Thus he saw 
them, thus he heard, whilst the pale and watery sunlight 
lit up the form of the toiler in Pherae. 

For even as it was with the divinity of Delos, so is it 
likewise with the genius of a man, which, being born of 
a god, yet is bound as a slave to the grindstone. Since, 
even as Hermes mocked the Lord of the Unerring Bow, 
so is genius mocked of the world when it has bar- 
tered the herds, and the grain, and the rod that metes 
wealth, for the seven chords that no ear, dully mortal, 
can hear. 

And as he looked upon this symbol of his life, the 
captivity and the calamity, the strength and the slavery 
of his existence overcame him ; and for the first hour 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


217 


since he had been born of a woman Arslan buried his 
face in his hands and wept. 

lie could bend great thoughts to take the shapes that 
he chose, as the chained god in Pherae bound the strong 
kings of the desert and forest to carry his yoke; yet, like 
the god, he likewise stood fettered to the mill to grind 
for bread. 


BOOK IV. 


CHAPTER 1. 

A VALLEY long and narrow, shut out from the rest of 
the living world by the ramparts of stone that rose on 
either side to touch the clouds; dense forests of pines, 
purple as night, where the erl-king rode and the bear- 
king reigned ; at one end mountains, mist, and gloom, at 
the other end the ocean ; brief days with the sun shed on 
a world of snow, in which the sounds of the winds and 
the moans of the wolves alone were heard in the soli- 
tude ; long nights of marvelous magnificence with the 
stars of the arctic zone glowing with an unbearable luster 
above a sea of phosphorescent fire ; those were Arslan’s 
earliest memories — those had made him what he was. 

In that pine-clothed Norwegian valley, opening to the 
sea, there were a few homesteads gathered together 
round a little wooden church, with torrents falling above 
them, and a profound loneliness around ; severed by more 
than a day’s journey from any other of the habitations 
of men. 

There a simple idyllic life rolled slowly on through the 
late and lovely springtimes, when the waters loosened 
and the seed sprouted, and the white blossoms broke 
above the black ground: through the short and glorious 
summers, when the children’s eyes saw the elves kiss 
the roses, and the fairies float on the sunbeam, and the 
maidens braided their fair hair with blue cornflowers to 
dance on the eve of St. John : through the long and 
silent winters, when an almost continual night brooded 
over all things, and the thunder of the ocean alone 
answered the war of the wind-torn forests, and the blood- 
red blaze of the northern light gleamed over a white still 
( 218 ) 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


219 


mountain world, and, within doors, by the warm wood 
fire the youths sang Scandinavian ballads, and the old 
people told strange sagas, and the mothers, rocking their 
new-born sons to sleep, prayed God to have mercy on all 
human lives drowning at sea and frozen in the snow. 

In this alpine valley, a green nest, hidden amidst stu- 
pendous walls of stone, bottomless precipices, and sum- 
mits that touched the clouds, there was a cottage even 
smaller and humbler than most, and closest of all to the 
church. It was the house of the pastor. 

The old man had been born there, and had lived there 
all the years of his life, — save a few that he had passed in 
a town as a student, — and he had wedded a neighbor who, 
like himself, had known no other home than this one 
village. He was gentle, patient, simple, and full of ten- 
derness ; he worked, like his people, all the week through 
in the open weather among his fruit-trees, his little 
breadth of pasturage, his herb-garden, and his few sheep. 

On the Sabbath-day he })reached to the people the creed 
that he himself believed in with all the fond, unquestion- 
ing, implicit faith of the young children who lifted to him 
their wondering eyes. 

lie was good ; he was old: in his simple needs and 
his undoubting hopes he was happy ; all the living things 
of his little world loved him, and he loved them. So fate 
lit on him to torture him, as it is its pleasure to torture 
the innocent. 

It sent him a daughter who was fair to sight, and had 
a voice like music; a form lithe and white, hair of gold, 
and with eyes like her own blue skies on a summer night. 

She had never seen any other spot save her own 
valley ; but she had the old Norse blood in her veins, and 
she was restless ; the sea tempted her with an intense 
power ; she desired passionately without knowing what 
she desired. 

The simple pastoral work, the peaceful household labors, 
the girls’ garland of alpine flowers, the youths’ singing 
in the brief rose twilight, the saga told the thousandth 
time around the lamp in the deep midwinter silence; 
these things would not suffice for her. The old Scandi- 
navian Bersaeck madness was in her veins. The mount- 


220 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


ains were to her as the walls of a tomb. And one day 
the sea tempted her too utterly ; beyond her strength ; 
as a lover, after a thousand vain entreaties, one day 
tempts a woman, and one day finds her weak. The sea 
vanquished her, and she w'ent — whither ? 

They hardly knew : to these old people the world that 
lay behind their mountain fortress was a blank It might 
be a paradise ; it might be a prison. They could not tell. 

They suffered their great agony meekly ; they never 
cursed her ; they did not even curse their God because 
they had given life to a woman-child. 

After awhile they heard of her. 

She wrote them tender and glowing words; she was 
well, she was proud, she was glad, she had found those 
who told her that she had a voice which was a gift of 
gold, and that she might sing in triumph to the nations. 
Such tidings came to her parents from time to time ; brief 
words, first teeming with hope, then delirious with 
triumph, yet ever ending with a short, sad sigh of con- 
science, a prayer for pardon — pardon for what ? The 
letters never said : perhaps only for the sin of desertion. 

The slow salt tears of age fell on these glowing pages 
in which the heart of a young, vainglorious, mad, tender 
creature had stamped itself; but the old people never 
spoke of them to others. “ She is happy, it does not 
matter for us.” This was all they said, yet this gentle 
patience was a martyrdom too sharp to last; within that 
year the mother died, and the old man was left alone. 

The long winter came, locking the valley within its 
fortress of ice, severing it from all the rest of the breath- 
ing human world ; and the letters ceased. He would not 
let them say that she had forgotten; he chose to think 
that it was the. wall of snow which was built up between 
them rather than any division raised by her ingratitude 
and oblivion. 

The sweet, sudden spring came, all the white and 
golden flowers breaking up from the hard crust of the 
soil, and all the loosened waters rushing with a shout of 
liberty to join the sea. The summer followed, with the 
red mountain roses blossoming by the brooks, and the 
green mountain grasses blowing in the wind, with the 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


221 


music of the herd-bells ringing down the passes, and the 
sound of the life and of the reed-pipe calling the maidens 
to the dance. 

In the midst of the summer, one night, when all the 
stars were shining above the quiet valley, and all the 
children slept under the roofs with the swallows, and not 
a soul was stirring, save where here and there a lover 
watched a light glare in some lattice underneath the 
eaves, a half-dead woman dragged herself feebly under 
the lime-tree shadows of the pastor’s house, and struck 
with a faint cry upon the door and fell at her father’s 
feet, broken and senseless. Before the full day dawned 
she had given birth to a male child and was dead. 

Forgiveness had killed her; she might have borne 
reproach, injury, malediction, but against that infinite 
love which would bear with her even in her wretched- 
ness, and would receive her even in her abasement, she 
had no strength. 

She died as her son’s eyes opened to the morning light. 
He inherited no name, and they called him after his grand- 
sire, Arslan. 

When his dead daughter lay stretched before him in 
the sunlight, with her white large limbs folded to rest, 
and her noble fair face calm as a mask of marble, the old 
pastor knew little — nothing — of what her life through 
these two brief years had been. Her lips had scarcely 
breathed a word before she had fallen senseless on his 
threshold. That she had had triumph he knew; that she 
had fallen into dire necessities he saw. Whether she had 
surrendered art for the sake of love, or whether she had 
lost the public favor by some public caprice, whether she 
had been eminent or obscure in her career, whether it 
had abandoned her, or she had abandoned it, he could 
not tell, and he knew too little of the world to be able to 
learn. 

That she had traveled back on her weary way home- 
ward to her native mountains that her son might not 
perish amidst strangers; thus much he knew, but no 
more. Nor was more ever known by any living soul. 

In life there are so many histories which are like 
broken boughs that strew the ground, snapped short at 

19 * 


222 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


either end, so that none know the crown of them nor the 
root. 

The child, whom she had left, grew in goodliness, and 
strength, and stature, until the people said that he was 
like the child-king, whom their hero Frithiof raised up 
-upon his buckler above the multitude: and who was not 
afraid, but boldly gripped the brazen shield, and smiled 
fearlessly at the noonday sun. 

The child had his mother’s Scandinavian beauty; the 
beauty of a marble statue, white as the snow, of great 
height and largely moulded ; and his free life amidst the ice- 
fields and the pine-woods, and on the wide, wild northern 
seas developed these bodily to their uttermost perfection. 
The people admired and wondered at him; love him they 
did not. The lad was cold, dauntless, silent ; he repelled 
their sympathies and disdained their pastimes. He chose 
rather to be by himself, than with them. He was never 
cruel ; but he was never tender ; and when he did«speak 
he spoke with a sort of eloquent scorn and caustic imag- 
ery that seemed to them extraordinary in one so young. 

But his grandfather loved him with a sincere love, 
though it was tinged with so sharp a bitterness ; and 
reared him tenderly and wisely ; and braced him with a 
scholar’s lore and by a mountaineer’s exposure ; so that 
both brain and body had their due. He was a simple 
childlike broken old man; but in this youth of promise 
that unfolded itself beside his age seemed to strike fresh 
root, and he had wisdom and skill enough to guide it justly. 

The desire of his soul was that his grandson should 
succeed him in the spiritual charge of that tranquil and 
beloved valley, and thus escape the dire perils of that 
world in which his mother’s life had been caught and 
consumed like a moth’s in flame. But Arslan’s eyes 
looked ever across the ocean with that look in them 
which had been in his mother’s; and when the old 
Norseman spoke of this holy and peaceful future, he was 
silent. 

Moreover, he — who had never beheld but the rude 
paintings on panels of pine that decorated the little red 
church under the firs and lindens, — he had the gift of art 
in him. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


223 


He had few and rough means only with which to make 
his crude and unguided essays ; but the delirium of it 
was on him, and the peasants of liis village gazed awe- 
stricken and adoring before the things which he drew on 
every piece of pine-wood, on every smooth breadth of 
sea-worn granite, on every bare surface of lime-washed 
wall that he could find at liberty for his usage. 

When they asked him what, in his manhood, he would 
do, he said little. “I will never leave the old man,” he 
made answer ; and he kept his word. Up to his twen- 
tieth year he never quitted the valley. He studied 
deeply, after his own manner; but nearly all his hours 
were passed in the open air alone, in the pure cold air of 
the highest mountain summits, amidst the thunder of the 
furious torrents, in the black recesses of lonely forests, 
where none, save the wolf and the bear, wandered with 
him; or away on the vast expanse of the sea, where the 
storm drove the great arctic waves like scourged sheep, 
and the huge breakers seized the shore as a panther its 
prey. 

On such a world as this, and on the marvelous nights 
of the north, his mind fed itself and his youth gained its 
powers. The faint, feeble life of the old man held him 
to this lonely valley that seemed filled with the coldness, 
the mystery, the unutterable terrov and the majesty of 
the arctic pole, to which it looked ; but unknown to 
him, circumstance thus held him likewise where alone 
the genius in him could take its full shape and full 
stature. 

Unknown to him, in these years it took the depth, the 
strength, the patience, the melancholy, the virility of the 
North ; took these never to be lost again. 

In the twentieth winter of his life an avalanche en- 
gulfed the pastor’s house, and the little church by which 
it stood, covering both beneath a mountain of earth and 
snow and rock and riven trees. Some of the timbers 
withstood the shock, and the roof remained standing, 
uncrushed, above their heads. The avalanche fell some 
little time after midnight: tljpre were only present in the 
dwelling himself, the old man, and a serving woman. 

The woman was killed on her bed by the fall of a beam 


224 


FOLLE-FARINE, 


upon her; he and the pastor still lived : lived in perpetual 
darkness without food or fuel, or any ray of light. 

The wooden clock stood erect, uninjured; they could 
hear the hours go by in slow succession. The old man 
was peaceful and even cheerful ; praising God often and 
praying that help might come to his beloved one. But 
his strength could not hold out against the icy cold, the 
long hunger, the dreadful blank around as of perpetual 
night. He died ere the first day had wholly gone by, 
at even-song; saying still that he was content, and still 
praising God who had rewarded his innocence with shame 
and recompensed his service with agony. 

For two more days and nights Arslkn remained in his 
living tomb, enshrouded in eternal gloom, alone with the 
dead, stretching out his hands ever and again to meet 
that icy touch rather than be without companionship. 

On the morning of the third day the people of the vil- 
lage, who had labored ceaselessly, reached him, and he 
was saved. 

As soon as the spring broke he left the valley and 
passed over the mountains, seeking a new world. 

His old familiar home had become hateful to him ; he 
had no tie to it save two low graves, still snow-covered 
underneath a knot of tall stone-pines; the old Norse pas- 
sion of wandering was in his veins as it had been in his 
mother’s before him ; he fiercely and mutely descried free- 
dom, passion, knowledge, art, fame, as she had desired 
them, and he went: turning his face from that lowly 
green nest lying like a lark’s between the hills. 

He did not go as youth mostly goes, blind with a divine 
dream of triumph : he went, consciously, to a bitter 
combat as the sea-kings of old, whose blood ran in his 
veins, and whose strength was in his limbs, had gone to 
war, setting their prow hard against the sharp salt waves 
and in the teeth of an adverse wind. 

He was not without money. The pastor, indeed, had 
died almost penniless ; he had been always poor, and had 
given the little he possessed to those still poorer. But 
the richest landowner in the village, the largest possessor 
of flocks and herds, dying childless, had bequeathed his 
farm and cattle to Arslan ; having loved the lad’s dead 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


225 


mother silently and vainly. The value of these realized 
by sale gave to Arslan, when he became his own master, 
. what, in that valley at least, was wealth ; and he went 
without care for the future on this score into the world 
of men ; his mind full of dreams and the beautiful myths 
of dead ages his temper compounded of poetry and of 
coldness, of enlhusiasm and of skepticism ; bis one passion 
a supreme ambition, pure as snow in its instinct, but half 
savage in its intensity. 

From that spring, when he had passed away from his 
birthplace as the winter snows were melting on the 
mountain-sides, and the mountain flowers were putting 
forth their earliest buds under the pine-boughs, until the 
time that he now stood solitary, starving, and hopeless 
before the mocking eyes of his Hermes, twelve years had 
run their course, and all through them he had never once 
again beheld his native land.. 

Like the Scandinavian Regner, he chose rather to 
perish in the folds, and by the fangs, of the snakes that 
devoured him than return to his country with the con- 
fession of defeat. And despite the powers that were in 
him, his life had been a failure, an utter failure — as yet. 

In his early youth he had voyaged often with men who 
went to the extreme north in search of skins and such 
poor trade as they could drive with Esquimaux or Koraks ; 
he had borne their dangers and their poverty, their 
miseries and their famine, for sake of seeing what they 
saw; — the pathless oceans of the ice realm, the trailing 
pines alone in a white, snow-world, the red moon fantastic 
and horrible in a sky of steel, the horned clouds of rein- 
deer rushing through the endless night, the arch of the 
aurora spanning the heavens with their fire, lie had 
passed many seasons of his boyhood in the silence, the 
solitude, the eternal 'desolation of the mute mystery of 
the arctic world, which for no man has either sympathy 
or story ; and in a way he had loved it, and was often 
weary for it ; in a way its spirit remained with him 
always ; and its inexorable coldness, its pitiless indifier- 
ence to men’s wants and weakness, its loneliness and its 
purity, and its scorn, were in all the works of his hand ; 
blended in a strange union with the cruelty and the 


226 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


voluptuousness, and the gorgeousness of color, that gave to 
everything he touched the gleed and the temper of thecase. 

Thus, what he did pleased none ; being for one half the 
world too chill, and being for the other half too sensual. 

The world had never believed in iiim ; and he found 
himself in the height and the maturity of his powers con- 
demned to an absolute obscurity. Not one man in a 
million knew his name. 

During these years he had devoted himself to the study 
of art with an undeviating subservience to all its tyran- 
nies. He had studied humanity in all its phases; he had 
studied form with all the rigid care that it requires; he 
had studied color in almost every land that lies beneath 
the sun ; he had studied the passions in all their defor- 
mities, as well as in all their beauties ; he liad spared 
neither himself nor others in pursuit of knowledge. He 
had tried most vices, he had seeil all miseries, lie had 
spared himself no spectacle, however loathsome; he had 
turned back from no license, however undesired, that 
could give him insight into or empire over human raptures 
and affliction. Neither did he spare himself any labor 
however costly, however exhausting, to enrich his brain 
with that varied learning, that multifarious scene which 
he held needful to every artist who dared to desire great- 
ness. The hireling beauty of the wanton, the splendor 
of the sun and sea, the charnel lore of anatomy, the 
secrets of dead tongues and buried nations, the horrors 
of the lazar wards and pest-houses, the glories of golden 
deserts and purple vineyards, the flush of love on a young 
girl’s cheek, the rottenness of corruption on a dead man’s 
limbs, the hellish tint of a brothel, the divine calm of an 
Eastern night; all things alike he studied, without abhor- 
rence as without delight, indifferent to all save for one 
end* — knowledge and art. 

So entirely and undividedly did this possess him that 
it seenied to have left him without other passions; even 
as the surgeon dissects the fair lifeless body of some 
woman’s corpse, regardless of loveliness or sex, only in- 
tent on the secret of disease, the mystery of formation, 
which ho seeks therein, so did he study the physical 
beauty of women and their mortal corruption, without 


folle-farine: 


22T 


other memories than those of art. He would see the 
veil fall from off the limbs of a creature lovely as a god- 
dess, and would think only to himself, — “ How shall I 
render this so that on my canvas it shall live once 
more ?” 

One night, in the hot, close streets of Damascus, a man 
was stabbed, — a young Maronite, — who lay dying in the 
roadway, without sign or sound, whilst his assassins fled ; 
the silver Syrian moon shining full on his white and 
scarlet robe, jus calm, upturned face, his lean hand knotted 
on the dagger he had been spared no time to use ; a 
famished street dog smelling at his blood. Arslan, pass- 
ing through the city, saw and paused beside him ; stood 
still and motionless, looking down on the outstretched 
figure ; then drew his tablets out and sketched the serene, 
rigid face, the flowing, blood-soaked robes, the hungry 
animal mouthing at the wound. Another painter, his 
familiar friend, following on his steps, joined him a little 
later, and started from his side in horror. 

“ My God 1 what do you do there be cried. “ Do 
you not see ? — the man is dying.” 

Arslan looked up — “ I had not thought of that,” he 
answered. 

It was thus always with him. 

He was not cruel for the sake of cruelty. To animals 
he was humane, to women gentle, to meft serene ; but 
his art was before all things with him, and with humanity 
he had little sympathy: and if he had passions, they had 
wakened no more than as the drowsy tiger wakes in the 
hot hush of noon, half indifferent, half lustful, to strike 
fiercely what comes before her, and then, having slain, 
couches herself and sleeps again. 

But for this absolute surrender of his life, his art had 
as yet recompensed him nothing. 

Men did not believe in him; what ho wrought sad- 
dened and terrified them ; they turned aside to those who 
fed them on simpler and on sweeter food. 

His works were great, but they were such as the pub- 
lic mind deems impious. They unveiled human corrup- 
tion too nakedly, and they shadowed forth visions too 
exalted, and satires too unsparing, for them to be accept- 


228 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


able to the multitude. They were compounded of an 
idealism clear and cold as crystal, and of a reality cruel 
and voluptuous as love. They were penetrated with an 
acrid satire and an intense despair : the world, which 
only cares for a honeyed falsehood and a gilded gloss in 
every art, would have none of them. 

So for these twelve long years his labor had been 
waste, his efforts been fruitless. Those years had been 
costly to him in purse ; — travel, study, gold flung to fallen 
women, sums spent on faithless friends, uttei; indifference 
to whosoever robbed him so long as he was left in peace 
to pursue lofty aims and high endeavors ; all these did 
their common work on wealth which was scanty in the 
press of the world, though it had appeared inexhaustible 
on the shores of the north sea. His labors also were 
costly, and they brought him no return. 

The indifference to fortune of a man of genius is, to a 
man of the world, the stupor of idiocy : from such a 
stupor he was shaken one day to find himself face to face 
with beggary. 

His works were seen by few, and these few were an- 
tagonistic to them. 

All ways to fame were closed to him, either by the envy 
of other painters, or by the apathies and the antipathies 
of the nations themselves. In all lands he was repulsed ; 
he roused the'jealousy of his compeers and the terror of 
the multitudes. They hurled against him the old worn- 
out cry that the office of art was to give pleasure, not pain ; 
and when his money was gone, so that he could no longer, 
at his own cost, expose his works to the public gaze, they 
and he were alike obliterated from the public marts ; they 
had always denied him fame, and they now thrust him 
quickly into oblivion, and abandoned him to it without 
remorse, and even with contentment. 

He could, indeed, with the facile power of eye and touch 
that he possessed, have easily purchased a temporary 
ease, an evanescent repute, if he had given the world from 
his pencil those themes for which it cared, and descended 
to the commop spheres of common art. But he refused 
utterly to do this. The best and greatest thing in him 
was his honesty to the genius wherewith he was gifted ; 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


229 

he refused to prostitute it; he refused to do other than to 
tell the truth as he saw it. 

“This man blasphemes; this man is immoral,” his 
enemies had always hooted against him. 

It is what the world always says of those who utter 
unwelcome truths in its unwilling ears. 

So the words of the old Scald by his own northern ^a- 
shores came to pass ; and at length, for the sake of art, it 
came to this, that he perished for want of bread. 

For seven days he had been without food, except the 
winter berries which he broke off the trees without, and 
such handfuls of wheat as fell through the disjointed tim- 
bers of the ceiling, for whose possession he disputed with 
the rats. 

The sheer, absolute poverty which leaves the man 
W'hom it has seized without so much as even a crust 
wherewith to break his fast, is commoner than the world 
in general ever dreams. For he was now so poor that 
for many months he had been unable to buy fresh canvas 
on which to work, and had been driven to chalk the out- 
lines of the innumerable fancies that pursued him upon 
the bare smooth gray stone walls of the old granary in 
which he dwelt. 

He let his life go silently away without complaint, and 
without effort, because effort had been so long unavailing, 
that he had discarded it in a contemptuous despair. 

He accepted his fate, seeing nothing strange in it, and 
nothing pitiable; since many men better than he had borne 
the like. He could not have altered it without beggary 
or theft, and he thought either of these worse than itself. 

There were hecatombs of grain, bursting their sacks, in 
the lofts above ; but when, once on each eighth day, the 
maltster owning them sent his men to fetch some from the 
store, Arslkn let the boat be moored against the wall, be 
filled with barley, and be pushed away again down the cur- 
rent, without saying once to the rowers, “Wait; I starve I” 

And yet, though like a miser amidst his gold, his body 
starved amidst the noble shapes and the great thoughts 
that his brain conceived and his hand called into sub- 
stance, he never once dreamed of abandoning for any 
other the career to which he had dedicated himself from 

20 


230 


I 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


the earliest days that his boyish eyes had watched the 
vast arc of the arctic lights glow above the winter seas. 

Art was to him as mother, brethren, mistress, offspring, 
religion — all that other men hold dear. He had none of 
these, he desired none of them ; and his genins sufficed to 
him in their stead. 

•It was an intense and reckless egotism, made alike cruel 
and sublime by its intensity and purity, like the egotism 
of a mother in her child. To it, as the mother to her child, 
he would have sacrificed every living creature; but to it 
also, like her, he would have sacrificed his very existence 
as unhesitatingly. But it was an egotism which, though 
merciless in its tyranny, was as pure as snow in its im- 
personality ; it was untainted by any grain of avarice, of 
vanity, of selfish desire; it was independent of all sympa- 
thy ; it was simply and intensely the passion for immor- 
tality : — that sublime selfishness, that superb madness, of 
all great minds. 

Art had taken him for its own, as Demeter, in the days 
of her desolation, took the child Demophoon, to nurture 
him as her own on the food of gods, and to plunge him 
through the flames of a fire that would give him immor- 
tal life. As the pusillanimous and sordid fears of the 
mortal mother lost to the child for evermore the posses- 
sion of Olympian joys and of perpetual youth, so did the 
craven and earthly cares of bodily needs hold the artist 
back from the radiance of the life of the soul, and drag 
him from the purifying fires. Yet he had not been 
utterly discouraged ; he strove against the Metaniera of 
circumstance ; he did his best to struggle free from the 
mortal bonds that bound him ; and as the child Demo- 
phoon mourned for the great goddess that had nurtured 
him, refusing to be comforted, so did he turn from the 
base consolations of the senses and the appetites, and be- 
held ever before his sight the ineffable majesty of that 
Mater Dolorosa who once had anointed him as her own. 

Even now, as the strength returned to his limbs and 
the warmth to his veins, the old passion, the old worship, 
returned to him. 

The momentary weakness which had assailed him 
passed away. He shook himself with a bitter impatient 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


231 


scorn for the feebleness into which he had been be- 
trayed ; and glanced around him still with a dull wonder 
as to the strange chances which the night past had 
brought. He was incredulous still ; he thought that his 
fancy, heated by long fasting, might have cheated him ; 
that he must have dreamed ; and that the food and fuel 
which he saw must surely have been his own. 

Yet reflection told him that this could not be ; he re- 
membered that for several weeks his last coin had been 
spent; that he had been glad to gather the birds’ winter 
berries to crush beneath his teeth, and gather the dropped 
corn from the floor to quiet the calm of hunger ; that for 
many a day there had been no fire on the hearth, and that 
only a frame which the long sunless northern winters had 
braced in early youth, had enabled him to resist and en- 
dure the cold. Therefore, it must be charity ! 

Charity 1 as the hateful truth came home to him, he 
met the eyes of the white, slender, winged Hermes ; eyes 
that from out that colorless and smiling face seemed to 
mock him with a cruel contempt. 

His was the old old story; — the rod of wealth bar- 
tered for the empty shell that gave forth music. 

Hermes seemed to know it and to jeer him. 

Hermes, the mischief-monger, and the trickster of men, 
the inventive god who spent his days in chicanery of his 
brethren, and his nights in the mockery of mortals; the 
messenger of heaven who gave Pandora to mankind; 
Hermes, the eternal type of unscrupulous Success, seemed 
to have voice and cry to him : — “ Oh, fool, fool, fool ! who 
listens for the music of the spheres and disdains the 
only melody that men have ears to hear — the melody of 
gold!” 

Arslan turned from the great cartoon of the gods in 
Pherae, and went out into the daylight, and stripped and 
plunged into the cold and turbulent stream. Its chillness 
and the combat of its current braced his nerves and cleared 
his brain. 

When he was clad, he left the grain-tower with the 
white forms of its gods upon its walls, and walked slowly 
down the bank of the river. Since life had been forced 
back upon him he knew that it was incumbent upon his 


232 


FOLLE-FARTNE. 


manhood to support it by the toil of bis hands if men 
would not accept the labor of his brain. 

Before, be had been too absorbed in his pursuit, too 
devoted to it body and soul, to seek to sustain existence 
by the sheer manual exertion which was the only thing 
that he had left untried for seif-maintenance. In a man- 
ner too he was too proud ; not too proud to labor, but 
too proud to easily endure to lay bare his needs to the 
knowledge of others. But now, human charity must 
have saved him; a charity which he hated as the foulest 
insult of his life ; and he had no chance save to accept it 
like a beggar bereft of all shame, or to seek such work as 
would give him his daily bread. 

So he went; feebly, for he was still weak from the 
length of his famine. 

The country was well knoAvn to him, but the people 
not at all. He had come by hazard on the old ruin where 
he dwelt, and had stayed there full a year. These serene 
blue skies, these pale mists, these corn- cl ad slopes, these 
fields of plenteous abundance, these quiet homesteads, 
these fruit-harvests of this Norman plain were in sooth- 
ing contrast to all that his life had known. 

These old quaint cities, these little villages that seemed 
always hushed with the sound of bells, these quiet streams 
on which the calm sunlight slept so peacefully, these 
green and golden lands of plenty that stretched away to 
the dim gray distant sea, — all these had had a certain 
charm for him. 

He had abided with them, partly because amidst them 
it seemed possible to live on a handful of wheat and a 
draught of water, unnoticed and unpitied; partly because 
having come hither on foot through many lands and by 
long hardship, he had paused here weary and incapable 
of further effort. 

Whilst the little gold he had had on him had lasted he 
had painted innumerable transcripts of its ancient build- 
ings, and of its summer and autumnal landscapes. And 
of late — through the bitter winter — of late it had seemed 
to him that it was as well to die here as elsewhere. 

AVhen a man knows that his dead limbs will be hud- 
dled into the common ditch of the poor, the nameless, 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


233 


and the unclaimed, and that his dead brain will only 
serve for soil to feed some little rank wayside poisonous 
weed, it will seldom seem of much moment in what earth 
the ditch be dug, by what feet the sward be trod. 

He went now on his way seeking work ; he did not 
care what, he asked for any that might serve to use such 
strength as hunger had left in him, and to give him his 
daily bread. But this is a great thing to demand in this 
world, and so he found it. 

They repulsed him everywhere. 

They had their own people in plenty, they had their 
sturdy, tough, weather-beaten women, who labored all 
day in rain, or snow, or storm, for a pittance, and they 
had these in larger numbers than their field-work needed. 
They looked at him askance ; this man with the eyes of 
arctic blue and the grave gestures of a king, who only 
asked to labor as the lowest among them. He was a 
stranger to them ; he did not speak their tongue with 
their accent; he looked, with that white beauty and that 
lofty stature, as though he could crush them in the hol- 
low of his hand. 

They would have none of him. 

“ He brings misfortune I’’ they said among themselves ; 
and they would have none of him. 

He had an evil name with them. 

They said at eventide by their wood-fires that strange 
things had been seen since he had come to the granary 
by the river. 

Once he had painted a study of the wondrous child 
Zagreus gazing in the fatal mirror, from the pretty face 
of a stonecutter’s little fair son ; the child was laughing, 
happy, healthful at noon, crowned with carnations and 
river-lilies, and by sunset he was dead — dead like the 
flowers that were still among his curls. 

Once a girl had hired herself as model to him for an 
Egyptian wanton, half a singer and half a gypsy — hand- 
some, lithe, fantastic, voluptuous: the very night she left 
the granary she was drowned in crossing a wooden bridge 
of the river, which gave way under the heavy tramp of a 
fantoccini player who accompanied her. 

Once he had sketched, for the corner of an Oriental 
20 * 


234 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


study, a rare-plum aged bird of the south, which was the 
idol of a water-carrier of the district, and the wonder of 
all the children round ; and from that date the bird had 
sickened, and drooped, and lost its colors, and pined until 
it died. 

The boy’s death had been from a sudden seizure of one 
of the many ills of infancy ; the dancing-girl’s had come 
from a common accident due to the rottenness of old worn 
water-soaked timber ; the mocking-bird’s had arisen from 
the cruelty of captivity and the chills of northern winds ; 
all had been the result of simple accident and of natural 
circumstance. But they had sufficed to fill with horror 
the minds of a peasantry always bigoted and strongly 
prejudiced against every stranger; and it became to them 
a matter of implicit credence that whatsoever living thing 
should be painted by the artist Arslan would assuredly 
never survive to see the rising of the morrow’s sun. 

In consequence, for leagues around they shunned him ; 
not man, nor woman, nor child would sit to him as models ; 
and now, when he sought the wage of a daily labor among 
them, he was everywhere repulsed. He had long repulsed 
human sympathy, and in its turn it repulsed him. 

At last he turned and retraced his steps, baffled and 
wearied ; his early habits had made him familiar with all 
manner of agricultural toil ; he would have done the task 
of the sower, the herdsman, the hewer of wood, or the 
charcoal-burner; but they would none of them believe 
this of one with his glance and his aspect; and solicita- 
tion was new to his lips and bitter there as gall. 

He took his way back along the line of the river; the 
beauty of the dawn had gone, the day was only now 
chilly, heavy with a rank moisture from the steaming 
soil. Broken boughs and uprooted bushes were floating 
on the turgid water, and over all the land there hung a 
sullen fog. 

The pressure of the air, the humidity, the colorless 
stillness that reigned throughout, weighed on lungs which 
for a score of years had only breathed the pure, strong, 
rarefied air of the north ; he longed with a sudden 
passion to be once more amidst his native mountains 
under the clear steel-like skies, and beside the rush of the 


FOLLE-FARTNE. 


235 


vast wild seas. Were it only to die as he looked on them, 
it were better to die there than here. 

He longed, as men in deserts thirst for drink, for one 
breath of the strong salt air of the north, one sight of the 
bright keen sea-born sun as it leapt at dawn from the 
waters. 

The crisp cold nights, the heavens which shone as steel, 
the forests tilled with the cry of the wolves, the mountains 
which the ocean ceaselessly assailed, the mighty waves 
which marched erect like armies, the bitter arctic wind 
which like a saber cleft the darkness ; all these came back 
to him beloved and beautiful in all their cruelty ; desired 
by him, with a sick longing for their freshness, for their 
fierceness, for their freedom. 

As he dragged his tired limbs through the grasses and 
looked out upon the sullen stream that flowed beside him, 
an oar struck the water, a flat black boat drifted beneath 
the bank, a wild swan disturbed rose with a hiss from the 
sedges. 

The boat was laden with grain ; there was only one 
rower in it, who steered by a string wound round her foot. 

She did not lift her face as she went by him ; but her 
bent brow and her bosom grew red, and she cut the water 
with a swifter, sharper stroke ; her features were turned 
from him by that movement of her head, but he saw the 
Eastern outline of the cheek and chin, the embrowned 
velvet of the skin, the half-bare beauty of the heaving 
chest and supple spine bent back in the action of the oars, 
the long, slender, arched shape of the naked foot, round 
which the cord was twined: their contour and their 
color struck him with a sudden surprise. 

He had seen such oftentimes, eastwards, on the banks 
of golden rivers, treading, with such feet as these, the 
sands that were the dust of countless nations ; bearing, 
on such shoulders as these, earthen water-vases that 
might have served the feasts of Pharaohs ; showing such 
limbs as these against the curled palm branches, and the 
deep blue sky, upon the desert’s edge. But here I — a face 
of Asia among the cornlands of Northern France? It 
seemed to him strange ; he looked after her with wonder. 

The boat went on down the stream without any pause; 


236 


FOLLE FARINE. 


the sculls cleaving the heavy tide with regular and reso- 
lute monotony; the amber piles of the grain and the 
brown form of the bending figure soon hidden in the 
clouds of river-mist. 

He watched her, only seeing a beggar-girl rowing a 
skiff full of corn down a sluggish stream. There was 
nothing to tell him that he was looking upon the savior 
of his body from the thralls of death; if there had been, 
— in his mood then, — he would have cursed her. 

The boat glided into the fog which closed behind it: a 
flock of water-birds swam out from the rushes and darted 
at some floating kernels of wheat that had fallen over 
the vessel’s side ; they fought and hissed, and flapped 
and pecked among themselves over the chance plunder ; 
a large rat stole amidst them unnoticed by them in their 
exultation, and seized their leader and bore him struggling 
and beating the air with blood-stained wings away to a 
hole in the bank ; a mongrel dog, prowling on the shore, 
hearing the wild duck’s cries, splashed into the sedges, 
and swam out and gripped the rat by the neck in bold 
sharp fangs, and bore both rat and bird, bleeding and 
dying, to the land; the owner of the mongrel, a peasant, 
making ready the soil for colza in the low-lying fields, 
snatched the duck from the dog to bear it home for his 
own eating, and kicked his poor beast in the ribs for hav- 
ing ventured to stray without leave and to do him service 
without permission. “ The dulcet harmony of the world’s 
benignant law,” thought Arslan, as he turned aside to 
enter the stone archway of his own desolate dwelling. 
“To live one must slaughter — what life can I take?” 

At that moment the setting sun pierced the heavy veil 
of the vapor, and glowed through the fog. 

The boat, now distant, glided for a moment into the 
ruddy haze, and was visible ; the water around it, like a 
lake of flame, the white steam above it like the smoke of 
a sacrifice fire. 

Then the sun sank, the mists gathered closely once 
more, all light faded, and the day was dead. 

He felt stifled and sick at heart as he returned along 
the reedy shore towards his dreary home. He wondered 
dully why his life would not end : since the world would 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


23T 


have none of him, neither the work of his brain nor the 
work of his hands, it seemed that he had no place in it. 

He was half resolved to lie down in the water there, 
among the reeds, and let it flow over his face and breast, 
and kiss him softly and coldly into the sleep of death. 
He had desired this many times ; what held him back 
from its indulgence was not “the child within us that 
fears death,” of which Plato speaks ; he had no such mis- 
giving in him, and he believed death to be a simple 
rupture and end of all things, such as any man had right 
to seek and summon for' himself; it was rather that the 
passion of his art was too strong in him, that the power 
to create was too intense in him, so that he could not 
willingly consign the forces and the fantasies of his brain 
to that assimilation to which he would, without thought 
or pause, have flung his body. 

As he entered the haunted hall which served him as 
his painting-room, he saw a fresh fire of logs upon the 
hearth, whose leaping flames lighted the place with 
cheerful color, and he saw on the stone bench fresh food, 
sufficient to last several days, and a brass flagon filled 
with wine. 

A curious emotion took possession of him as he looked. 
It was less surprise at the fact, for his senses told him 
that it was the work of some charity which chose to 
hide itself, than it was wonder as to who, in this strange 
land, where none would even let him earn his daily 
bread, knew enough or cared enough to supply his 
necessities thus. And with this there arose the same 
intolerant bitterness of the degradation of alms, the same 
ungrateful hatred of the succor that seemed to class him 
among beggars, which had moved him when he had 
awakened with the dawn. 

He felt neither tenderness nor gratitude, he was only 
conscious of humiliation. 

There were in him a certain coldness, strength, and 
indifference to sympathy, which, whilst they made his 
greatness as an artist, made his callousness as a man. 
It might have been sweet to others to find themselves 
thus remembered and pitied by another at an hour when 
their forces were spent, their fate friendless, and their 


238 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


hopes all dead. But it was not so to him, he only felt 
like the desert animal which, wounded, repulses every 
healing hand, and only seeks to die alone. 

There was only one vulnerable, one tender, nerve in 
him, and this was the instinct of his genius. lie had 
been nurtured in hardihood, and haS drawn in endur- 
ance with every breath of his native air ; he would have 
borne physical ills without one visible pang, and would 
have been indifferent to all mortal suffering ; but for the 
powers in him for the art he adored, he had a child’s 
weakness, a woman’s softness. 

He could not bear to die without leaving behind his 
life some work the world would cherish. 

Call it folly, call it madness, it is both ; the ivory Zeus 
that was to give its sculptor immortality lives but in 
tradition ; the bronze Athene that was to guard the 
Piraeus in eternal liberty has long been leveled with the 
dust; yet with every age the artist still gives life for 
fame, still cries, “Let my body perish, but make my 
work immortal 1” 

It was this in him now which stirred his heart with a 
new and gentler emotion ; emotion which, while half dis- 
gust was also half gladness. This food was alms-given, 
since he had not earned it, and yet — by means of this 
sheer bodily subsistence — it would be possible for him to 
keep alive those dreams, that strength by which he still 
believed it in him to compel his fame from men. 

He stood before the Phoebus in Pherae, thinking; it 
stung him with a bitter torment; it humiliated him with 
a hateful burden — this debt which came he knew not 
whence, and which he never might be able to repay. 
And yet his heart was strangely moved ; it seemed to 
him that the fate which thus wantonly, and with such 
curious persistence, placed life back into his hands, must 
needs be one that would bear no common fruit. 

He opposed himself no more to it. He bent his head 

and broke bread, and ate and drank of the red wine : 

he did not thank God or man as he broke his fast; he 
only looked in the mocking eyes of Hermes, and said in 
his heart: 

“ Since I must live, I will triumph.” 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


239 


And Hermes smiled : Hermes the wise, who had 
bought and sold the generations of men so long ago in 
the golden age, and who knew so well how they would 
barter away their greatness and their gladness, their 
bodies and their souls, for one sweet strain of his hollow 
reed pipe, for one sweet glance of his soulless Pandora’s 
eyes. 

Hermes — Hermes the liar, Hermes the wise — knew 
how men’s oaths were kept. 


CHAPTER II. 

At the close of that day Claudis Flamma discovered 
that he had been robbed — robbed more than once : he 
swore and raved and tore his hair for loss of a little 
bread and meat and oil and a flagon of red wine. He 
did not suspect his granddaughter ; accusing her perpet- 
ually of sins of which she was innocent, he did not once 
associate her in thought with the one offense which she 
had committed. He thought that the window of his 
storehouse had been forced from the exterior; he made 
no doubt that his spoiler was some' vagabond from one 
of the river barges. Through such tramps his henhouse 
and his apple-lofts had often previously been invaded. 

She heard his lamentations and imprecations in un- 
broken silence; he did not question her; and without a 
lie she was able to keep her secret. 

In her own sight she had done a foul thing — a thing 
that her own hunger had never induced her to do. She 
did not seek to reconcile herself to her action by any re- 
flection that she had only taken what she had really 
earned a thousand times over by her service; her mind 
was not sufficiently instructed, and was of too truthful a 
mould to be capable of the deft plea of a sophistry. She 
could dare the thing ; and do it, and hold her peace about 
it, though she should be scourged to speak ; but she 
could not tamper with it to excuse it to herself ; for this 
she had neither the cunning nor the cowardice. 


240 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


Why had she done it ?— done for a stranger what no 
pressure of need had made her do for her own wants ? 
She did not ask herself; she followed her instinct. He 
allured her with his calm and kingly beauty, which was 
like nothing else her eyes had ever seen ; and she. was 
drawn by an irresistible attraction to this life which she 
had bought at the price of her own from the gods. Yet 
stronger even than this sudden human passion which had 
entered into her was the dread lest he whom she had 
ransomed from his death should he know his debt to 
her. 

Under such a dread, she never opened her lips to any 
one on this thing which she had done. Silence was 
natural to her ; she spoke so rarely, that many in the 
province believed her to be dumb ; no sympathy had 
ever been shown to her to woo her to disclose either the 
passions that burned latent in her veins, or the tenderness 
that trembled stifled in her heart. 

Thrice again did she take food and fuel to the water- 
tower undetected, both by the man whom she robbed, 
and the man whom she succored. Thrice again did she 
find her way to the desolate chamber in its owner’s 
absence and refill the empty platters and warm afresh the 
cold blank hearth. Thrice again did Claudis Flamma 
note the diminution of his stores, and burnish afresh his 
old rusty fowling-piece, and watch half the night on his 
dark staircase, and prepare with his own hands a jar of 
poisoned honey and a bag of poisoned wheat, which he 
placed, with a cruel chuckle of grim glee, to tempt the 
eyes of his spoilers. 

But the spoiler being of his own household, saw this 
trap set, and was aware of it. 

In a week or two the need for these acts which she 
hated ceased. She learned that the stranger for whom 
she thus risked her body and soul, had found a boatman’s 
work upon the water, which, although a toil rough and 
rude, and but poorly paid, still sutficed to give him bread. 
Though she herself was so pressed with hunger, many a 
time, that as she went through the meadows and hedge- 
rows she was glad to crush in her teeth the tender shoots 
of the briers and the acrid berry of the brambles, she 


FOLLE-FARINE, 


241 


never again, unbidden, touched so much as a mouldy 
^rust thrown out to be eaten by the poultry. 

Flamma, counting his possessions greedily night and 
morning, blessed the saints for the renewed safety of his 
dwelling, and cast forth the poisoned wheat as a thank- 
offering to the male birds who were forever flying to and 
fro their nested mates in the leafless boughs above the 
earliest violets, and whose little throats were strangled 
even in their glad flood of nuptial song, and whose soft 
bright eyes grew dull in death ere even they had looked 
upon the springtide sun. 

For it was thus ever that Folle-Farine saw men praise 
God. 

She took their death to her own door, sorrowing and 
full of remorse. 

“ Had I never stolen the food, these birds might never 
have perished,” she thought, as she saw the rosy throats 
of the robins and bullfinches turned upward in death on 
the turf. 

She blamed herself bitterly with an aching heart. 

The fatality which makes human crime recoil on the 
innocent creatures of the animal world oppressed her 
with its heavy and hideous injustice. Their God was 
good, they said : yet for her sin and her grandsire’s 
greed the harmless song-birds died by the score in tor- 
ment. 

“How shall a God be good who is not just?” she 
thought. In this mute young lonely soul of hers Natui-e 
had sown a strong passion for justice, a strong instinct 
towards what was righteous. 

As the germ of a plant born in darkness underground 
will, by sheer instinct, uncurl its colorless tendrils, and 
thrust them through crevices and dust, and the close 
structure of mortared stones, until they reach the light 
and grow green and strong in it, so did her nature strive, 
of its own accord, through the gloom enveloping it; 
towards those moral laws which in all ages and all lands 
remain the same, no matter what deity be worshiped, 
or what creed be called the truth 

Her nascent mind was darkened, oppressed, bewil- 
dered, perplexed, even like the plant which, forcing itself 

21 


242 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


upward from its cellar, opens its leaves not in pure air 
and under a blue sky, but in the reek and smoke and 
fetid odors of a city. 

Yet, like the plant, she vaguely felt that light was 
somewhere ; and as vaguely sought it. 

With most days she took her grandsire’s boat to and 
fro the town, fetching or carrying ; there was no mode 
of transit so cheap to him as this, whose only cost was 
her fatigue. With each passage up and down the river, 
she passed by the dwelling of Arslan. 

Sometimes she saw him ; once or twice, in the twilight, 
he spoke to her ; she only bent her head to hide her face 
from him, and rowed more quickly on her homeward way 
in silence. At other times, in his absence, and when she 
was safe from any detection, she entered the dismal soli- 
tudes wherein he labored, and gazed in rapt and awed 
amazement at the shapes that were shadowed forth upon 
the walls. 

The service by which he gained his daily bread was 
on the waters, and took him often leagues away — simple 
hardy toil, among fishers and canal-carriers and barge- 
men. But it left him some few days, and all his nights, 
free for art ; and never in all the years of his leisure had 
his fancy conceived, and his hand created, more exquisite 
dreams and more splendid fantasies than now in this 
bitter and cheerless time, when he labored amidst the 
poorest for the bare bread of life. 

“ Des belles choses peuvent se faire dans une cave:” 
and in truth the gloom of the cellar gives birth to an art 
more sublime than the light of the palace can ever beget. 

Suffering shortens the years of the artist, and kills him 
oftentimes ere his prime be reached ; but in suffering 
alone are all great works conceived. 

The senses, the passions, the luxuries, the lusts of the 
flesh, the deliriums of the desires, the colors, the melo- 
dies, the fragrance, the indolences, — all that make the 
mere “living of life” delightful, all go to enrich and to 
deepen the human genius which steeps itself in them ; but 
it is in exile from these that alone it can rise to its greatest. 

The grass of the Holy River gathers perfume from the 
marvelous suns and the moonless nights, and the gor- 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


243 


geous bloom of the East, from the aromatic breath of the 
leopard and the perfume of the fajlen pomegranate; from 
the sacred oil that floats in the lamps, and the caress of 
the girl-bathers’ feet and the myrrh-dropping unguents 
that glide from the maidens’ bare limbs in the moonlight, 
— the grass holds and feeds on them all. But not till the 
grass has been torn from the roots, and been crushed, 
and been bruised and destroyed, can the full odors exhale 
of all it has tasted and treasured. 

Even thus the imagination of man maybe great, but it 
can never be at its greatest until one serpent, with merci- 
less fangs, has bitten it through and through, and im- 
pregnated it with passion and with poison — that one 
deathless serpent which is Memory. 

Arslan had never been more ceaselessly pursued by 
innumerable fantasies, and never had given to these a 
more terrible force, a more perfect utterance, than now, 
when the despair which possessed him was absolute, — 
when it seemed to him that he had striven in his last 
strife with fate, and been thrown never to rise again, — 
when he kept his body alive by such soulless, ceaseless 
labor as that of the oxen in the fields, — when he saw 
every hour drift by, barren, sullen, painful, — when only 
some dull yet stanch instinct of virility held him back 
from taking his own life in the Ifleak horror of these 
fruitless days, — when it seemed to him that his oath be- 
fore Hermes to make men call him famous was idle as 
the sigh of a desert wind through the hollow ears of a 
skull bleaching white on the sand. 

Yet he had never done greater things, — never in the 
long years through which he had pursued and studied art. 

With the poor wage that he earned by labor he bought 
by degrees the tools and pigments lacking to him, and 
lived on the scantiest and simplest food, that he might 
have wherewith to render into shape and color the imag- 
inations of his brain. 

And it was on these that the passionate, wondering, 
half-blinded eyes of Folle-Farine looked with awe and 
adoration in those lonely hours when she stole, in his 
absence, into his chamber, and touching nothing, scarcely 
daring to breathe aloud, crouched on the bare pavement 


244 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


mute and motionless, and afraid with a fear that was the 
sweetest happiness her brief youth had ever known. 

Though lier own kind had neglected and proscribed 
her, with one accord, there had been enough in the little 
world surrounding her to feed the imaginative senses 
latent in her, — enough of the old media3val fancy, of the 
old ecclesiastical beauty, of the old monastic spirit, to 
give her a consciousness, though a dumb one, of the ex- 
istence of art. 

Untaught though she was, and harnessed to the dreary 
mill-wheel round of a hard physical toil, she yet had felt 
dimly the charm of the place in which she dwelt. 

Where the fretted pinnacles rose in hundreds against 
the sky, — where the common dwellings of the poor were 
paneled and parquetted and carved in a thousand fash- 
ions, — where the graceful and the grotesque and the 
terrible were mingled in an inextricable, and yet ex- 
quisite, confusion, — where the gray squat jug that went 
to the well, and the jutting beam to which the clothes’ 
line was fastened, and the creaking sign that swung above 
the smallest wineshop, and the wooden gallery on which 
the poorest troll hung out her many-colored rags, had all 
some trace of a dead art, some fashioning by a dead 
hand, — where all these were it was not possible for any 
creature dowered by nature with any poetic instinct to 
remain utterly unmoved and unawakened in their midst. 

Of the science and the execution of art she was still 
absolutely ignorant; the powers by which it was created 
still seemed a magic incomprehensible, and not human ; 
but its meaning she felt with that intensity which is the 
truest homage of all homage to its influence. 

Day after day, therefore, she returned and gazed on 
the three gods of forgetfulness, and on all the innumer- 
able forms and fables which bore them company ; the 
virgin field of her unfilled mind receiving the seeds of 
thought and of fancy that were scattered so largely in 
this solitude, lying waste, bearing no harvest. 

Of these visits Arslan himself knew nothing; towards 
him her bold wild temper was softened to the shyness of 
a doe. 

She dreaded lest he should ever learn what she had 


FOLLE-FARTNE. 


245 


done ; and she stole in and out of the old fyranarj, un- 
seen by all, with the swiftness and the stealthiness which 
she shared in common with other untamed animals, 
which, like her, shunned all man- and womankind. 

And this secret — in itself so innocent, yet for which 
she would at times blush in her loneliness, with a cruel 
heat that burnt all over her face and frame — changed her 
life, transfigured it from its objectless, passionless, brutish 
dullness and monotony, into dreams and into desires. 

For the first time she had in her joy and fear; for the 
first time she became human. 

All the week through he wrought perforce by night ; the 
great windows stood wide open to the bright, cold moon 
of early spring; he worked only with black and white, using 
color only at sunrise, or on the rare days of his leisure. 

Often at nightfall she left her loft, as secretly as a fox 
its lair, and stole down the river, and screened herself 
among the grasses, and watched him where he labored 
in the mingling light of the moon, and of the oil-lamp 
burning behind him. 

She saw these things grow from beneath his hand, these 
mighty shapes created by him ; and he seemed to her like 
a god, with the power to beget worlds at his will, and all 
human life in its full stature out from a little dust. 

The contrast of this royal strength, of this supreme 
power which he wielded, with the helpless exhaustion of 
the body in which she had found him dying, smote her 
with a sorrow and a sweetness that were like nothing she 
had ever owned. That a man could summon hosts at his 
command like this, yet perish for a crust I — that fusion of 
omnipotence and powerlessness, which is the saddest and 
the strangest of all the sad strange things of genius, 
awoke an absorbing emotion in her. 

She watched him thus for hours in the long nights of - 
a slow-footed spring, in whose mists and chills and heavy 
dews her inured frame took no more harm than did the 
green corn shooting through the furrows. 

She was a witness to his solitude. She saw the fancies 
of his brain take form. She saw the sweep of his arm 
call up on the blank of the wall, or on the pale spaces of 
the canvas, these images which for her had alike such 

21 * 


246 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


majesty and such mystery. She saw the faces beam, the 
eyes smile, the dancing-women rise, the foliage uncurl, the 
gods come forth from the temples, the nereids glide through 
the moonlit waters, at his command, and beneath histouch. 

She saw him also in those moments when, conceiving 
•no eyes to be upon him, the man whom mankind denied 
loosened rein to the bitterness in him; and, standing 
weary and heartsick before these creations for which his 
generation had no sight, and no homage, let the agony 
of constant failure, of continual defeat, overcome him, and 
cursed aloud the madness which possessed him, and drove 
him on forever in this ungrateful service, and would not 
let him do as other men did — tell the world lies, and take 
its payment out in gold. 

Until now she had hated all things, grieved for none, 
unless, indeed, it were for a galled ox toiling wounded and 
tortured on the field ; or a trapped bird, shrieking in the 
still midnight woods. 

But now, watching him, hearing him, a passionate 
sorrrow for a human sorrow possessed her. And to her 
eyes he was so beautiful in that utter iinlikeness to her- 
self and to all men whom she had seen. She gazed at 
him, never weary of that cold, fair, golden beauty, like 
the beauty of his sun-god ; of those serene deep-lidded 
eyes, which looked so often past her at the dark night 
skies; of those lithe and massive limbs, like the limbs of 
the gladiator that yonder on the wall strained a lion to 
his breast in the deadly embrace of combat. 

She gazed at him until she loved him with the intense 
passion of a young and ignorant life, into whose gloom 
no love had ever entered. With this love the instinct 
of her womanhood arose, amid the ignorance and sav- 
agery of her nature ; and she crouched perpetually under 
Jho screen of the long grass to hide her vigil, and when- 
• ever his eyes looked from his easel outward to the night 
she drew back, breathless and trembling, she knew not 
why, into the deepest shadow. 

Meantime, with that rude justice which was in her, she 
' set herself atonement for her fault — the fault through 
which those tender little bright- throated birds were 
stretched dead among the first violets of the year. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


247 


She labored harder and longer than ever for her task- 
master, and denied herself the larger half of even those 
scanty portions which were set aside for her of the daily 
fare, living on almost nothing, as those learn to do who 
are reared under the roof of the French poor. To his 
revilings she was silent, and under his blows patient. 
By night she toiled secretly, until she had restored the 
value of that which she had taken. 

Why did she do it? She could not have told. She 
was proud of the evil origin they gave her; she had 
a cynical gladness in her infamous repute; she scorned 
'women and hated men ; yet all the same she kept her 
hands pure of thefts and her lips pure of lies. 

So the weeks ran on till the hardness of winter gave 
way to the breath of the spring, and in all the wood and 
orchard around the water-mill the boughs were green 
with buds, and the ground was pale with primroses — a 
spring all the sweeter and more fertile because of the 
severity of the past winter. 

It became mid-April, and it was market-day for Ypr^s, 
and for all the other villages and homesteads lying round 
that wondrous cathedral-spire, that shot into the air, far- 
reaching and ethereal, like some vast fountain whose 
column of water had been arrested, and changed to ice. 

The old quiet town was busy, with a rich sunshine 
shed upon it, in which the first yellow butterflies of the 
year had begun to dance. 

It was high noon, and the highest tide of the market. 

Flower-girls, fruit-girls, egg-sellers, poultry-hucksters, 
crowds of women, old and young, had jolted in on their 
docile asses, throned on their sheepskin saddles; and 
now, chattering and chaffering, drove fast their trade. 
On the steps of the cathedral boys with birds’-nests, 
knife-grinders making their little wheels fly, cobblers ham- 
mering, with boards across their knees, traveling peddlers 
with knapsacks full of toys and mirrors, and holy images, 
and strings of beads, sat all together in competition but in 
amity. 

Here and there a priest passed, with his black robe 
and broad hat, like a dusky mushroom among a bed of 
varihued gillyflowers. Here and there a soldier, all 


248 


FOLLE-FAUINE. 


color and glitter, showed like a gaudy red tulip in bloom 
amidst tufts of thyme. 

The old wrinkled leathern awnings of the market-stalls 
glowed like copper in the brightness of the noon. The 
red tiles of the houses edging the great square were 
gilded with yellow houseleeks. 

The little children ran hither and thither with big 
bunches of primroses or sheaves of blue wood-hyacinths, 
singing. The red and blue serges of the young girls^ 
bodices were like the gay hues of the anemones in their 
baskets ; and the brown faces of the old dames under the 
white roofing of their headgear were like the russet faces 
of the home-kept apples they had garnered through all 
the winter. 

Everywhere in the shade of the flapping leather, and 
the darkness of the wooden porches, there were the ten- 
der blossoms of the field and forest, of the hedge and 
garden. The azure of the hyacinths, the pale saffron of 
the primroses, the cool hues of the meadow daffodils, the 
ruby eyes of the cultured jonquils, gleamed among wet 
ferns, gray herbs, and freshly budded leafage. Plovers’ 
eggs nestled in moss-lined baskets ; sheaves of velvet- 
coated wallflowers poured fragrance on the air ; great 
plumes of lilac nodded on the wind, and amber feathers 
of laburnum waved above the homelier masses of mint 
and marjoram, and sage and saxafrage. 

It was high noon, but the women still found leisure- 
time to hear the music of their own tongues, loud and 
continuous as the clacking of mill paddles. 

In one corner an excited little group was gathered 
round the stall of a favorite flower-seller, who wore a bright 
crimson gown, and a string of large silver beads about 
her neck, and a wide linen cap that shaded her pretty 
rosy face as a great snowy mushroom may grow between 
the sun and a little ruddy wild strawberry. 

Her brown eyes were now brimming over with tears 
where she stood surrounded by all the treasures of spring. 
She held clasped in her arms a great pot with a young 
almond-tree growing in it, and she was weeping as 
though her heart would break, because a tile had fallen 
from a roof above and crushed low all its pink splendor 
of blossom. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


249 


“ I saw her look at it,” she muttered. “ Look at it as 
she passed witli her wicked eyes •, and a black cat on the 
roof mewed to her; and that moment the tile fell. Oh, 
my almond-tree 1 oh, my little darling I the only one I 
saved out of three through the frosts ; the very one 
that was to have gone this very night to Paris.” 

“ Thou art not alone, Edmee,” groaned an old woman, 
tottering from her egg-stall with a heap of ruffled, blood- 
stained, brown plumage held up in her hand. “Look! 
As she went by my poor brown hen — the best sitter I 
have, good for eggs with every sunrise fron Lent to Noel 
— just cackled and sliook her tail at her; and at that very 
instant a huge yellow dog rushed in and killed the 
blessed bird — killed her in her basket I A great yellow 
beast that no one had ever seen before, and that vanished 
again into the earth, like lightning.” 

“Not worse than she did to my precious Reni}^,” said 
a tanner’s wife, who drew after her, clinging to her 
skirts, a little lame, misshapen, querulous child. 

“ She 'hath the evil eye,” said sternly an old man who 
had served in the days of his boyhood in the Army of 
Italy, as ho sat washing fresh lettuces in a large brass 
bowl, by his grandson’s herb-stall. 

“ You remember how we met her in the fields last 
Feast-night of the Three Kings?” asked a youth looking 
up from plucking the feathers out from a living, strug- 
gling, moaning goose. “ Coming singing through the 
fog like nothing earthly; and a moment later a torch 
caught little Jocelin’s curls and burnt him till he was so 
hideous that his mother could scarce have known him. 
You remember?” 

“ Surely we remember,” they cried in a hearty chorus 
round the broken almond-tree. “ Was there not the good 
old Dax this very winter, killed by her if ever any creat- 
ure were killed by foul means, though the law would never 
listen to the Flandrins when they said so?” 

“ And little Bernardou,” added one who had not hitherto 
spoken. “ Little Bernardou died a month after his gran- 
dam, in ho.spital. She had cast her eye on him, and the 
poor little lad never rallied.” 

“A jettatrice ever brings misfortune,” muttered the old 


250 


FOLLE-FAUINE. 


soldier of Napoleon, washing his last lettuce and lighting 
a fresh pipe. 

“ Or does worse,” muttered the mother of the crippled 
child. “ She is not for nothing the devil’s daughter, mark 
you.” 

'‘Nay, indeed,” said an old woman, knitting from a 
ball of wool with which a kitten played among the strewn 
cabbage-leaves and the crushed sweet-smelling thyme. 
“ Nay, was it not only this very winter that my son’s little 
youngest boy threw a stone at her, just for luck, as she 
went by in her boat through the town ; and it struck her 
and drew blood from her shoulder ; and that self-same 
night a piece of the oaken carvings in the ceiling gave 
way and dropped upon the little angel as he slept, and 
broke his arm above the elbow : — she is a witch ; there is 
no question but she is a witch.” 

“If I were sure so, I would think it well to kill her,” 
murmured the youth, as he stifled the struggling bird be- 
tween liis knees. 

“ My sister met her going through the standing corn 
last harvest-time, and the child she brought forth a week 
after was born blind, and is blind now,” said a hard- 
visaged woman, washing turnips in a basin of water. 

“ 1 was black-and-blue for a month when she threw me 
down, and took from me that hawk I had trapped, and 
went and fastened my wrist in the iron instead 1” hissed 
a boy of twelve, in a shrill piping treble, as he slit the 
tongue of a quivering starling. 

“ They say she dances naked, by moonlight, in the 
water with imps,” cried a bright little lad who was at 
play with the kitten. 

“ She is a witch, there is no doubt about that,” said 
again the old woman who sat knitting on the stone bench 
in the sun. 

“And her mother such a saint!” sighed another old 
dame who was grouping green herbs together for salads. 

And all the while the girl Edmee clasped her almond- 
tree and sobbed over it. 

“ If she were only here,” swore Edmee’s lover, under 
his breath. 

At that moment the accused came towards them, erect 
in the full light. 


/ 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


261 


She had passed through the market with a load of 
herbs and flowers for one of the chief hostelries in the 
square, and was returning with the flat broad basket 
balanced empty on her head. 

Something of their mutterings and curses reached her, 
but she neither hastened nor slackened her pace; she came 
on towards them with her free, firm step, and her lustrous 
eyes flashing hard against the sun. 

She gave no sign that she had heard except that the 
blood darkened a little in her cheeks, and her mouth curled 
with a haughtier scorn. But the sight of her, answering 
in that instant to their hate, the sight of her wll-h the 
sunshine on her scarlet sash and her slender limbs, added 
impulse to their rage. 

They had talked themselves into a passionate belief in 
her as a thing hellborn and unclean, that brought all 
manner of evil fates among them. They knew that holy 
water had never baptized her ; that neither cross nor 
chrism had ever exorcised her; that a church’s door had 
never 0})ened to her ; they had heard their children boot 
her many a time unrebuked, they had always hated her 
with the cruelty begotten by a timid cowardice or a 
selfish dread. They were now ripe to let their hate take 
shape in speech and act. 

The lover of Edmee loosened his hand from the silver 
beads about her throat, and caught up instead a stone. 

“Let us see if her flesh feels I” he cried, and cast it. 
It fell short of her, being ill aimed; she did not slacken 
her speed, nor turn out of her course ; she still came 
towards them erect and with an even tread. 

“Who lamed my Remy?” screamed the cripple’s 
mother. 

“Who broke my grandson’s arm?” cackled the old 
woman that sat knitting. 

“ Who withered my peach-tree ?” the old gardener 
hooted. 

“Who freed the devil-bird and put me on the trap?” 
yelled the boy with the starling. 

“Who flung the tile on the almond?” shouted the 
flower-girl’s lover. 

“ Who made my sister bring forth a little beast, blind 


252 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


as a mole?’’ shrieked the woman, washing in the brazen 
bowl. 

“ Who is a witch ? — who dances naked ? — who bathes 
with devils at the full moon ?” cried the youth who had 
plucked the goose bare, alive; and he stooped for a peb- 
ble, and aimed better than his comrade, and flung it at 
her as she came. 

“It is a shame to see the child of Reine Flamma so 
dealt with I” murmured the old creature that was group- 
ing her salads. But her voice found no echo. 

The old soldier even rebuked her. ‘‘A jettatrice should 
be killed for the good of the people,” he mumbled. 

Meanwhile she came nearer and nearer. The last 
stone had struck her upon the arm ; but it had drawn no 
blood ; she walked on with firm, slow steps into their 
midst; unfaltering. 

The courage did not touch them ; they thought it only 
the hardihood of a thing that was devil-begotten. 

“ She is always mute like that ; she cannot feel. 
“Strike, strike, strike I” cried the cripple’s mother; and 
the little cripple himself clapped his small hands and 
screamed his shrill laughter. The youths, obedient and 
nothing loth, rained stones on her as fast as their hands 
could fling them. Still she neither paused nor quailed ; 
but came on straightly, steadily, with her face set against 
the light. 

Thfeir impatience and their eagerness made their 
aim uncertain ; the stones fell fast about her on every 
side, but one alone struck her — a jagged flint that fell 
where the white linen skirt opened on her chest. It cut 
the skin, and the blood started; the children shrieked 
and danced with delight: the youths rushed at her in- 
flamed at once with her beauty and their own savage 
hate. 

“ Stone her to death ! Stone her to death !” they 
shouted; she only laughed, and held her head erect and 
stood motionless where they arrested her, without the 
blood once paling in her face or her eyes once losing their 
luminous calm scorn. 

The little cripple clapped his hands, climbing on his 
mother’s back to see the sight, and his mother screamed 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


253 


again and again above his laughter. “ Strike ! strike I 
strike I” 

One of the lads seized her in his arms to force her on 
her knees while the others stoned her. The touch of him 
roused all the fire slumbering in her blood. She twisted 
herself round in his hold with a movement so rapid that 
it served to free her ; struck him full on the eyes with her 
clinched hand in a blow that sent him stunned and stag- 
gering back; then, swiftly as lightning flash, drew her 
knife from her girdle, and striking out with it right and 
left, dashed through the people, who scattered from her 
path as sheep from the spring of a hound. 

Slowly and with her face turned full upon them, she 
backed her way across the market-place. The knife, 
turned blade outward, was pressed against her chest. 
None of them dared to follow her; they thought her 
invulnerable and possessed. 

She moved calmly with a firm tread backward — back- 
ward — backward ; holding her foes at bay ; the scarlet 
sash on her loins flashing bright in the sun ; her level 
brows bent together as a tiger bends his ere he leaps. 
They watched her, huddling together frightened , and 
silent Even the rabid cries of the cripple’s mother had 
ceased. On the edge of the great square she paused a 
moment; the knife still held at her chest, her mouth 
curled in contemptuous laughter. 

“ Strike now she cried to them ; and she dropped 
her weapon, and stood still. 

But there was not one among them who dared lift his 
hand. There was not so much as a word that answered 
her. 

She laughed aloud, and waited for their attack, while 
the bell in the tower above them tolled loudly the strokes 
of noon. No one among them stirred. Even the shrill 
pipe of the lame boy’s rejoicing had sunk, and was 
still. 

At that moment, through the golden haze of sun- 
beams and dust that hung above the crowd, she saw 
the red gleam of the soldiers of the state ; and their 
heavy tramp echoed on the silence as they hastened to 
the scene of tumult. She had no faith in any justice 

22 


254 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


/ 


which these would deal her ; had they not once dragged 
her before the tribunal of their law because she had forced 
asunder the iron jaws of that trap in the oak wood to give 
freedom to the blee^ling hawk that was struggling in it 
whilst its callow birds screamed in hunger in their nest 
in the branches above ? 

She had no faith in them ; nor in any justice of men ; 
and she turned and went down a twisting lane shaded 
from the sun, and ran swiftly as a doe through all its^ 
turns, and. down the steps leading to the water-side. 
There her boat was moored ; she entered it, and pulled 
herself slowly down the river, which now at noontide was 
almost deserted, whilst the shutters of the bouses that 
edged it on either side were all closed to keep out the sun. 

A boatman stretched half asleep upon the sacks in his 
barge ; a horse dozing in his harness on the towing-path ; 
a homeless child who had no one to call him in to shelter 
from the heat, and who sat and dappled his little burning 
feet in the flowing water ; these and their like were ail 
there were here to look on her. 

She rowed herself feebly with one oar gradually out of 
the ways of the town ; her left arm was strained, and for 
the moment, useless ; her shoulders throbbed with bruises ; 
and the wound from the stone still bled. She stanched the 
blood by degrees, and folded the linen over it, and went on ; 
she was so used to pain, and so strong, that this seemed 
to her to be but little. She had passed through similar 
scenes before, though the people had rarely broken into 
such open violence towards her, except on that winter’s 
day in the hut of Manon Dax. 

The heat was great, though the season was but mid- 
April. 

The sky was cloudless ; the air without a breeze. The 
pink blossoms of peach-trees bloomed between the old 
brown walls of the wooden houses. In the galleries, 
between the heads of saints and the faces of fauns, there 
were tufts of home-bred lilies of the valley and thick 
flowering bushes of golden genista. The smell of mign- 
onette was sweet upon the languid breeze, and here and 
there, from out the darkness of some open casement, some 
stove-forced crimson or purple azalea shrub glowed : for 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


255 


the people’s merchandise was flowers, and all the silent 
water-streets were made lovely and fragrant by their fair 
abundance. 

The tide of the river was flowing in, the stream was 
swelling over all the black piles, and the broad smooth 
strips of sand that were visible at low water; it floated 
her boat inward with it without trouble past the last- 
houses of the town, past the budding orchards and gray 
stone walls of the outskirts, past the meadows and the 
cornfields and the poplars of the open country. A certain 
faintness had stolen on her with the gliding of the vessel 
and the dizzy movement of the water ; pain and the loss 
of blood filled her limbs with an unfamiliar weakness; she 
felt giddy and half blind, and almost powerless to guide 
her course. 

When she had reached the old granary where it stood 
among the waterdocks and rushes, she checked the boat 
almost unconsciously, and let it drift in amidst the reeds 
and lie there, and pulled herself feebly up through the 
shallow pools. Then she went across the stone sill of the 
casement into the chamber where she had learned to live 
a life that was utterly apart from the actual existence to 
which chance had doomed her. 

It was the height of noon; at such an hour the creator 
of these things that she loved was always absent at the 
toil which brought him his bread ; she knew that he never 
returned until the evening, never painted except at earli- 
est dawn. 

The place was her own in the freedom of solitude ; all 
these shapes and shadows in which imagination and tra- 
dition had taken visible shape were free to her; she. had 
grown to love them with a great passion, to seek them 
as consolers and as friends. She crept into the room ; 
and its coolness, its calm, its dimmed refreshing light 
seemed like balm after the noise of the busy market-place 
and the glare of the cloudless sunshine. A sick sense of 
fatigue and of feebleness had assailed her more strongly. 
She dropped down in the gloom of the place on the broad, 
cold flags of the floor in the deepest shadow, where the 
light from without did not reach, and beneath the cartoon 
of the gods of Oblivion. 


256 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


Of all the forms with which he had peopled its loneli- 
ness, these had the most profound influence on her in 
their fair, passionless, majestic beauty, in which it seemed 
to her that the man who iiad begotten them had repeated 
his own likeness. For they were all alike, yet unlike ; 
of the same form and feature, yet different even in their 
strong resemblance ; like elder and younger brethren who 
hold a close companionship. For Hypnos was still but a 
boy with his blue-veined eyelids closed, and his mouth rosy 
and parted like that of a slumbering child, and above his 
golden head a star rose in the purple night. Oneiros, 
standing next, was a youth whose eyes smiled as though 
they beheld visions that were welcome to him; in his 
hand, among the white roses, he held a black wand of 
sorcery, and around his bended head there hovered a dim 
silvery nimbus. Thanatos alone was a man fully grown ; 
and on his calm and colorless face there were blended an 
unutterable sadness, and an unspeakable peace; his eyes 
were fathomless, far-reaching, heavy laden with thought, 
as though they had seen at once the heights of heaven 
and the depths of hell ; and he, having thus seen, and 
knowing all things, had learned that there was but one 
good possible in all the universe, — that one gift which his 
touch gave, and which men in their blindness shuddered 
from and cursed. And above him and around him there 
was a great darkness. 

So the gods stood, and so they spoke, even to her; 
they seemed to her as brethren, masters, friends — these 
three immortals who looked down on her in their mute 
majesty. 

They are the gods of the poor, of the wretched, of the 
proscribed, — they are the gods who respect not persons 
nor palaces, — who stay with the exile and flee from the 
king, — who leave the tyrant of a world to writhe in 
torment, and call a smile beautiful as the morning on the 
face of a beggar child, — who turn from the purple beds 
where wealth, and lust, and brutal power lie, and fill 
with purest visions the darkest hours of the loneliest 
nights for genius and youth, — they are the gods of con- 
solation and of compensation, — the gods of the orphan, of 
the outcast, of the poet, of the prophet, of all whose bodies 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


25T 


ache with the infinite pangs of famine, and whose hearts 
ache with the infinite woes of the world, of all who hunger 
with the body or with the soul. 

And looking at them, she seemed to know them as her 
only friends, — as the only rulers who ever could loose the 
bands of her fate and let her forth to freedom — Sleep, and 
Dreams, and Death. 

They were above her where she sank upon the stone 
floor ; the shadows were dark upon the ground ; but the 
sunrays striking through the distant window against the 
opposite wall fell across the golden head of the boy 
liypnos, and played before his silver sandaled feet. 

She sat gazing at him, forgetful of her woe, her task, 
the populace that had hooted her abroad, the stripes that 
awaited her at home. The answering gaze of the gods 
magnetized her ; the poetic virus which had stirred 
dumbly in her from her birth awoke in her bewildered 
brain. Without knowing what she wanted, she longed 
for freedom, for liglit, for passion, for peace, for love. 

Shadowy fancies passed over her in a tumultuous 
})ageantry ; the higher instincts of her nature rose and 
struggled to burst the bonds in which slavery and igno- 
rance and brutish toil had bound them ; she knew nothing, 
knew no more than the grass knew that blew in the wind, 
than the passion-flower knew that slept unborn in the 
uncurled leaf; and yet withal she felt, saw, trembled, 
imagined, and desired, all mutely, all blindly, all in con- 
fusion and in pain. 

The weakness of tears rushed into her fearless eyes, 
that had never quailed before the fury of any living 
thing; her head fell on her chest; she wept bitterly, — 
not because the people had injured her, — not because 
her wounded flesh ached and -her limbs were sore, — 
but because a distance so immeasurable, so unalterable, 
severed her from all of which these gods told her without 
speech. 

The sunrays still shone on the three brethren, whilst 
the stones on which she sat and her cfwn form were dark 
in shadow ; and as though the bright boy Hypnos pitied 
her, as though he, the world’s consoler, had compassion 
for this thing so lonely and accursed of her kind, the dumb 

22 * 


258 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


violence of her weeping brought its own exhaustion 
with it. 

The drowsy heat of noon, pain, weariness, the faintness 
of fasting, the fatigue of conflict, the dreamy influences 
of the place, had their weight on her. Crouching there 
half on her knees, looking up ever in the faces of the 
three Immortals, the gift of Hypnos descended upon her 
and stilled her ; its languor stole through her veins ; its 
gentle pressure closed her eyelids ; gradually her rigid 
limbs and her bent body relaxed and unnerved ; she sank 
forward, her head lying on her outstretched arms, and 
the stillness of a profound sleep encompassed her. 

Oneiros added his gift also; and a throng of dim, de- 
lirious dreams floated through her brain, and peopled her 
slumber with fairer things than the earth holds, and made 
her mouth smile while yet her lids were wet. 

Thanatos alone gave nothing, but looked down on her 
with his dark sad e3^es, and held his finger on his close- 
pressed lips, as though he said — “Not yet.” 


CHAPTER III. 

Her sleep remained unbroken ; there was no sound to 
disturb it. The caw of a rook in the top of the poplar- 
tree, the rushing babble of the water, the cry of a field- 
mouse caught among the rushes by an otter, the far-olf 
jingle of mules’ bells from the great southern road that 
ran broad and white beyond the meadows, the gnawing 
of the rats in the network of timbers which formed the 
vaulted roof, these were all the noises that reached this 
solitary place, and these were both too faint and too 
familiar to awaken her. Heat and pain made her slum- 
ber heavy, and the forms on which her waking eyes had 
gazed made her sleep full of dreams. Hour after hour 
went by ; the shadows lengthened, the day advanced : 
nothing came to rouse her. At length the vesper bell 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


259 


rang over the pastures and the peals of the Ave Maria 
from the cathedral in the town were audible in the intense 
stillness that reigned around. 

As the chimes died, Arslan crossed the threshold of 
the granary and entered the desolate place where he had 
made his home. For once his labor had been early com- 
pleted, and he had hastened to employ the rare and pre- 
cious moments of the remaining light. 

He had almost stepped upon her ere he saw her, lying 
beneath his cartoons of the sons of Nyx. He paused 
and looked down. 

Her attitude had slightly changed, and had in it all the 
abandonment of youth and of sleep ; her face was turned 
upward, with quick silent breathings parting the lips; 
her bare feet were lightly crossed; the linen of her loose 
tunic was open at the throat, and had fallen back from 
her right arm and shoulder ; the whole supple grace and 
force that were mingled in her form were visible under 
the light folds of her simple garments. The sun still 
lingered on the bright bowed head of Hypnos, but all 
light had died from off the stone floor where she was 
stretched. 

As she had once looked on himself, so he now looked 
on her. 

But in him there arose little curiosity and still less 
pity ; he recognized her as the girl whom, with a face of 
old Egypt, he bad seen rowing her boat-load of corn 
down the river, and whom he had noticed for her strange 
.unlikeness to all around her. 

He supposed that mere curiosity had brought her there, 
and sleep overtaken her in the drowsiness of the first 
heat of the budding year. 

ble did not seek to rouse her, nor to spare her any 
shame or pain which, at her waking, she might feel. He 
merely saw in her a barbaric yet beautiful creature ; and 
his only desire was to use the strange charms in her for 
his art. 

A smooth-planed panel stood on an easel near ; turn- 
ing it where best the light fell, he began to sketch her 
attitude, rapidly, in black and white. It was quickly 
done by a hand so long accustomed to make such tran- 


260 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


scripts; and he soon went further, to that richer por- 
traiture which color alone can accomplish. The gray 
stone pavement ; the brown and slender limbs ; the 
breadth of scarlet giv^en by the sash about her loins ; the 
upturned face, whose bloom was as brilliant as that of a 
red carnation blooming in the twilight of some old wooden 
gallery; the eyelids, tear-laden still ; the mouth that 
smiled and sighed in dreaming; while on the wall above, 
the radiant figure of the young god remained in full sun- 
light whilst all beneath was dark; — these gave a picture 
which required no correction from knowledge, no addi- 
tion from art. 

He worked on for more than an hour, until the wood 
began to beam with something of the hues of flesh and 
blood, and the whole head was thrown out in color, al- 
though the body and the limbs still remained in their 
mere outline. 

Once or twice she moved restlessly, and muttered a 
little, dully, as though the perpetual unsparing gaze,- bent 
on her with a scrutiny so cold and yet so searching, dis- 
turbed or magnetized her even in her sleep. But she 
never awakened, and he had time to study and to trace 
out every curve and line of the half-developed loveliness 
before him with as little pity, with as cruel exactitude, as 
that with which the vivisector tears asunder the living 
animal whose sinews he severs, or the botanist plucks to 
pieces the new-born flower whose structure he desires to 
examine. 

The most beautiful women, who had bared their charms 
that he might see them live again upon his canvas, had 
seldom had power to make his hand tremble a moment in 
such translation. 

To the surgeon all sex is dead, all charm is gone, from 
the female corpse that his knife ravages in search of the 
secrets of science ; and to Arslan the women whom he 
modeled and portrayed were nearly as sexless, nearly as 
powerless to create passion or emotion. They were the 
tools for his art : no more. 

When, in the isolation of the long northern winters, he 
had sat beside the pine-wood that blazed on his hearth 
while the wolves howled down the deserted village street. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


261 


and the snow drifted up and blocked from sight the last 
pane of the lattice and the last glimpse of the outer world, 
he had been more enamored of the visions which visited 
him in that solitude than he had ever been since of the 
living creatures whose beauty he had recorded in his 
works. 

^He had little passion in him, or passion was dormant; 
and he had sought women, even in the hours of love, with 
coldness and with something of contempt for that license 
which, in the days of his comparative affluence, he had not 
denied himself. He thought always — 

“ De ces baisers puissants corame un dictarae, 

De ces transports plus vifs quo des rayous. 

Quo reste-t-il ? C’est aifreux, 6 mon auie ! 

Rien qu’un dessin fort pale aux trois crayons.” 

And for those glowing colors of passion which burned so 
hotly for an instant, only so soon to fade out into the 
pallor of indifference or satiety, he had a contempt which 
almost took the place and the semblance of chastity. 

He worked on and on, studying the sleeper at his feet 
with the keenness of a science that was as merciless in 
its way as the science which tortures and slaughters in 
order to penetrate the mysteries of sentient existence. 

She was beautiful in her way, this dark strange foreign 
child, who looked as though her native home must have 
been where the Nile lily blooms, and the black brows of 
the Sphinx are bent against the sun. 

She was beautiful like a young leopard, like a young 
python, coiled there, lightly breathing, and mute and mo- 
tionless and unconscious. He painted her as he would 
have painted the leopard or python lying asleep in the 
heavy hush of a noon of the tropics. And she was no 
more to him than these would have been. 

The shadows grew longer ; the sunlight died off the 
bright head of the boy Hypnos ; the feathery reeds on 
the bank without got a red flush from the west; there 
came a sudden burst of song from a boat-load of children 
going home from the meadows where they had gathered 
the first cowslips of the season in great sheaves tliat sent 
their sweetness on the air through the open window as 
they went by beneath the walls. 


262 


FOLLE-FARTNE. 


The shouts of the joyous singing rang shrilly through 
the silence ; they pierced her ear and startled her from 
her slumber; she sprang up suddenly, with a bound like 
a hart that scents the hounds, and stood fronting him; 
her eyes opened wide, her breath panting, her nerves 
strained to listen and striving to combat. 

For in the first bewildered instant of her awakening sh^ 
thought that she was still in the market-place of the town, 
and that the shouts were from the clamor of her late 
tormentors. 

He turned and looked at her. 

“ What do you fear?” he asked her, in the tongue of 
the country. 

She started afresh at the sound of his voice, and drew 
her disordered dress together, and stood mute, w^ith her 
hands crossed on her bosom, and the blood coming and 
going under her transparent skin. 

“ What do you fear ?” he asked again. 

“ I fear ?” 

She echoed the cowardly word with a half-tremulous 
defiance; the heroism of her nature, which an hour earlier 
had been lashed to its fullest strength, cast back the 
question as an insult; but her voice was low and husky, 
and the blood dyed her face scarlet as she spoke. 

For she feared him ; and for the moment she had for- 
gotten how she had come there and all that had passed, 
except that some instinct of the long-hunted animal was 
astir in her to hide herself and fly. 

But he stood between her and the passage outward, 
and pride and shame held her motionless. Moreover, 
she still listened intently : the confused voices of the 
children still seemed to her like those of the multitude by 
whom she had been chased ; and she was ready to leap 
tiger-like upon them, rather than let them degrade her in 
his sight. 

He looked at her with some touch of interest : she was 
to him only some stray beggar-girl, vrho had trespassed 
into his solitude; yet her untamed regard, her wide- 
open eyes, the staglike grace of her attitude, the sullen 
strength which spoke in her reply, — all attracted him 
to closer notice of these. 


FOLLE-FARINE, 


263 


“Why are you in this place he asked her, slowly. 
“You were asleep here when I came, more thau an hour 
ago.” 

The color burned in her face : she said nothing. 

The singing of the children was waxing fainter, as the 
boat floated from beneath the wall on its homeward way 
into the town. She ceased to fancy these cries the cries 
of her foes, and recollection began to revive in her. 

“AVhy did you come?” he repeated, musing how ho 
should persuade her to return to the attitude sketched out 
upon his easel. 

She returned his look with the bold truthfulness natural 
to her, joined with the apprehensiveness of chastisement 
which becomes second nature to every creature that is 
forever censured, cursed, and beaten for every real or 
imagined fault. 

“ I came to see those , she answered him, with a back- 
ward movement of her hand, which had a sort of rever- 
ence in it, up to the forms of the gods above her. 

The answer moved him ; he had not thought to find a 
feeling so high as this in this ragged, lonely, sunburnt 
child; and, to the man for whom, throughout a youth of 
ambition and of disappointment, the world had never 
found the voice of favor, even so much appreciation as lay 
in this outcast’s homage had its certain sweetness. For 
a man may be -negligent of all sympathy for himself, yet 
never, if he be poet or artist, will he be able utterly to 
teach himself indifference to all sympathy for his works. 

“Those!” he echoed, in surprise. “ What can they 
be to you ?” 

She colored at the unconcealed contempt that lay in 
his last word ; her head drooped ; she knew that they 
were much to her — friends, masters, teachers divine and 
full of pity. But she had no language in which to tell 
him this;^nd if she could have told him, she would have 
been ashamed. Also, the remembrance of those benefits 
to him, of whichjie was ignorant, had now come to her 
through the bewilderment of her thoughts, and it locked 
her lips to silence. 

Her eyes dropped under his ; the strange love she boro 
him made her blind and giddy and afraid ; she moved 


264 


FOLLE-FARINE, 


restlessly, glaring round with the half-timid, half-fierce 
glances of a wild animal that desires to escape and 
cannot. 

Watching her more closely, he noticed for the first time 
the stains of blood upon her shoulder, and the bruise on 
her chest, where the rent in her linen left it bare. 

“ You have been hurt he asked her, “ or wounded 

She shook her head. 

“ It is nothing.” 

“ Nothing ? You have fallen or been ill* treated, 
surely 

“ The people struck me.”, 

“ Struck you ? With what ?” ' 

“ Stones.” 

“ And why ?” 

“ 1 am Folle-Farine.” 

She answered him with the quiet calm of one who 
oflers an all-sufiicient reply. 

But the reply to him told nothing: he had been too 
shunned by the populace, who dreaded the evil genius 
which they attributed to him, to have been told by them 
of their fancies and their follies ; and he had never es- 
sayed to engage either their companionship or their con- 
fidence. To be left to work, or to die, in solitude undis- 
turbed was the uttermost that he had ever asked of any 
strange people amidst whom he had dwelt. 

“ Because you are Folle-Farine?” he repeated. “Is 
that a reason to hate you ?” 

She gave a gesture of assent. 

“ And you hate them in return ?” 

She paused a moment, glancing still hither and thither 
all round, as a trapped bird glances, seeking his way 
outward. 

“I think so,” she muttered; “and yet I have had 
their little children in my reach many a tiine by the 
water when the woods were all quiet, and I have never 
killed one yet.” 

lie looked at her more earnestly than he had done be- 
fore. The repressed passion that glanced under her 
straight dusky brows, the unspoken scorn which curled 
on her mouth, the nervous meaning with which her hands 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


265 


clinched on the folds of linen on her breast, attracted 
him ; there was a force in them all which aroused his 
< attention. There were in her that conscious power for 
ferocity, and that contemptuous abstinence from its exer- 
cise, which lie so often in the fathomless regard of the 
lion ; he moved nearer to her, and addressed her more 
gently. 

‘‘Who are you?” he asked, “and why have these 
people such savage violence against you ?” 

“1 am Folle-Farine,” she answered him again, unable 
to add anything else. 

“ Have you no other name ?” 

“No.” 

“ But you must have a home ? You live — where ?” 

“ At the mill with Flamma.” 

“ Does he also ill use you ?” 

“ He beats me.” 

“ When you do wrong?” 

She was silent. 

“Wrong?” “Right?” 

They were^but words to her — empty and meaningless. 
She knew that he beat her more often because she told 
truth or refused to cheat. For aught that she was sure 
of, she might be wrong, and he right. 

Arslan looked at her musingly. All the thought he 
had was to induce her to return to the attitude necessary 
to the completion of his picture. 

He put a few more questions to her ; but the replies 
told him little. At all times silent, before him a thou- 
sand emotions held her dumb. She was afraid, besides, 
that at every word he might suspect the debt he owed 
to her, and she dreaded its avowal with as passionate a 
fear as thongh, in lieu of the highest sacrifice and service, 
her action had been some crime against him. She felt 
ashamed of it, as of some unholy thing : it seemed to her 
impious to have dared to give him back a life that he had 
wearied of, and might have wished to lose. 

“ He must never know, he must never know,” she 
said to herself. 

She had never known what fear meant until she had 
looked on this man’s face. Now she dreaded, with an 

23 


266 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


intensity of apprehension, which made her start like a 
criminal at every sound, lest he should ever know of this 
gift of life which, unbidden, she had restored to him : this 
gift, which being thus given, her instinct told her he 
would only take as a burden of an intolerable debt of an 
unmeasurable shame. 

“ Perfect love casts out fear,” runs the tradition : rather, 
surely, does the perfect love of a woman break the courage 
which no other thing could ever daunt, and set foot on 
the neck that no other yoke would ever touch. 

By slow degrees he got from her such fragments of her 
obscure story as she knew. That this child, so friend- 
less, ill treated, and abandoned, had been the savior of 
his own existence, he never dreamed. A creature beaten 
and half starved herself could not, for an instant, seem to 
him one likely to have possessed even such humble gifts 
as food and fuel. Besides, his thoughts were less with 
her than with the interrupted study on his easel, and his 
one desire was to induce her to endure the same watch 
upon her, awakening, which had had power to disturb her 
even in her unconsciousness. She was nothing to him, 
save a thing that he wished to turn to the purpose of his 
art — like a flower that he- plucked on his way through the 
fields, for the sake of its color, to fill in some vacant nook 
in a mountain foreground. 

“ You have come often here ?” he asked her, whilst she 
stood before him, flushing and growing pale, irresolute 
and embarrassed, with her hands nervously gathering the 
folds of her dress across her chest, and her sad, lustrous, 
troubled eyes glancing from side to side in a bewildered 
fear. 

“ Often,” she muttered. “ You will not beat me for it ? 
I did no harm.” 

“ Beat you ? Among what brutes have you lived ? 
Tell me, why did you care to come ?” 

Her face drooped, and grew a deeper scarlet, where the 
warm blood was burning. 

“ They are beautiful, and they speak to me,” she mur- 
mured, with a pathetic, apologetic timidity in her voice. 

He laughed a little ; bitterly. 

“Are they? They have few auditors. But you are 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


26T 


beautiful, too, in your way. Has no one ever told you 
so 

She glanced at him half wistfully, half despairingly ; 
she thought that he spoke in derision of her. 

“ You,” he answered. “ Why not ? Look at yourself 
here : all imperfect as it is, you can see something of 
what you are.” 

Her eyes fell for the first time on the broad confused 
waves of dull color, out of whose depths her own face 
arose, like some fair drowned thing tossed upward on a 
murky sea. She started with a cry as if he had wounded 
her, and stood still, trembling. 

She had looked at her own limbs floating in the opaque 
water of the bathing pool, with a certain sense of their 
beauty wakening in her; she had tossed the soft, thick, 
gold-flecked darkness of her hair over her bare shoulder, 
with a certain languor and delight ; she had held a knot 
of poppies against her breast, to see their hues contrast 
with her own white skin ; — but she had never imagined 
that she had beauty. 

He watched her, letting the vain passion he thus 
taught her creep with all its poison into her veins. 

He had seen such wonder and such awed delight before 
in Nubian girls with limbs of bronze and eyes of night, 
who had never thought that they had loveliness, — though 
they had seen their forms in the clear water of the wells 
every time that they had brought their pitchers thither, 
— and who had only awakened to that sweet supreme 
sense of power and possession, when first they had beheld 
themselves live again upon his canvas. 

‘‘ You are glad ?” he asked her at length. 

She covered her face with her hands. 

“ I am frightened !” 

Frightened she knew not why, and utterly ashamed, 
to have lain thus in his sight, to have slept thus under 
his eyes; and yet filled with an ecstasy, to think that 
she was lovely enough to be raised amidst those mar- 
velous dreams that peopled and made heaven of his 
solitude. 

“ Well, then, — let me paint you there,” he said, after a 


268 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


pause. “ I am too poor to offer you reward for it. I have 
nothing ” 

“ I want nothing,’’ she interrupted him, quickly, while 
a dark shadow, half wrath, half sorrow, swept across her 
face. 

He smiled a little. 

“ I cannot boast the same. But, since you care for 
all these hapless things that are imprisoned here, do me, 
their painter, this one grace. Lie there, in the shadow 
again, as you were when you slept, and let me go on 
with this study of you till the sun sets.” 

A glory beamed over all her face. Her mouth trem- 
bled, her whole frame shook like a reed in the wind. 

“ If you care 1” she said, brokenly, and paused. It 
seemed to her impossible that this form of hers, which 
had been only deemed fit for the whip, for the rope, for 
the shower of stones, could have any grace or excellence 
in his sight; it seemed to her impossible that this face 
of hers, which nothing had ever kissed except the rough 
tongue of some honest dog, and which had been blown 
on by every storm-wind, beaten on by every summer 
sun, could have color, or shape, or aspect that could ever 
please him ! 

“Certainly I care. Go yonder and lie as you were 
lying a few moments ago — there in the shadow, under 
these gods.” 

She was used to give obedience — the dumb unques- 
tioning obedience of the packhorse or the sheepdog, and 
she had no idea for an instant of refusal. It was a 
great terror to her to hear his voice and feel his eyes 
on her, and be so near to him ; yet it was equally a joy 
sweeter and deeper than she had ever dreamed of as 
possible. He still seemed to her like a god, this man 
under whose hand flowers bloomed, and sunrays smiled, 
and waters flowed, and human forms arose, an(^ the 
gracious shapes of a thousand dreams grew into sub- 
stance. And yet, in herself, this man saw beauty 1 

He motioned her with a careless, gentle gesture, as a 
man motions a timid dog, to the spot over which the 
three brethren watched hand in hand ; and she stretched 
herself down passively and humbly, meekly as the dog 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


269 


stretches himself to rest at his master’s command. Over 
all her body the blood was leaping ; her limbs shuddered ; 
her breath came and went in broken murmurs ; her 
bright-hued skin grew dark and white by turns ; she was 
filled with a passionate delight that he had found any- 
thing in her to desire or deem fair ; and she quivered 
with a tumultuous fear that made her nervous as any 
panting hare. Her heart beat as it had never done when 
the people had raged in their fury around her. One 
living creature had found beauty in her; one human 
voice had spoken to her gently and without a curse ; 
one man had thought her a thing to be entreated and 
not scorned ; — a change so marvelous in her fate trans- 
figured all the world for her, as though the gods above 
had touched her lips with fire. 

But she was mute and motionless ; the habit of silence 
and of repression had become her second nature; no 
statue of marble could have been stiller, or in semblance 
more lifeless, than she was where she rested on the stones. 

Arslan noticed nothing of this ; he was intent upon 
his work. The sun was very near its setting, and every 
second of its light was precious to him. The world in- 
deed he knew would in all likelihood never be the wiser 
or the richer for anything he did ; in all likelihood he 
knew all these things that he created were destined to 
moulder away undisturbed save by the rats that might 
gnaw, and the newts that might traverse, them. He 
was buried here in the grave of a hopeless penury, of an 
endless oblivion. They w^ere buried with him ; and the 
world wanted neither him nor them. Still, having the 
madness of genius, he was as much the slave of his art 
as though an universal fame had waited his lowliest and 
lightest effort. 

With a deep breath that had half a sigh in it he threw 
down his brushes when the darkness fell. While he 
wrought, he forgot the abject bitterness of his life ; when 
he ceased work, he remembered how hateful a thing it is 
to live when life means only deprivation, obscurity, and 
failure. 

He thanked her with a few words of gratitude to her 
for her patience, and released her from the strain of the 
23 * 


210 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


attitude. She rose slowly wnth an odd dazzled look upon 
her face, like one coming out of great darkness into the 
full blaze of day. Her eyes sought the portrait of her 
own form, which was still hazy and unformed, amidst a 
mist of varying hues : that she should be elected to have 
a part with those glorious things which were the com- 
panions of his loneliness seemed to her a wonder so 
strange and so immeasurable that her mind still could 
not grasp it. 

For it was greatness to her: a greatness absolute and 
iiKiedible. The men had stoned, the women cursed, the 
children hooted her ; but he selected her — and her alone 
— for that supreme honor which his hand could give. 

Not noticing the look upon her face he placed before 
her on the rude bench, which served in that place for a 
table, some score of small studies in color, trifles brilliant 
as the rainbow, birds, flowers, insects, a leaf of fern, an 
orchid in full bloom, a nest with a blue warbler in it, a 
few peasants by a wayside cross, a child at a well, a 
mule laden with autumn fruit — anything which in the 
district had caught his sight or stirred his fancy. He 
bade her choose from them. 

“ There is nothing else here,” he added. “But since 
you care for such things, take as many of them as you 
will as recompense.” 

Her face flushed up to the fringes of her hair ; her eyes" 
looked at the sketches in thirsty longing. Except the 
scarlet scarf of Marcellin, this was the only gift she had 
ever had oflered her. And all these reproductions of the 
wmrld around her were to her like so much sorcery. 
Owning one, she would have worshiped it, revered it, 
caressed it, treasured it ; her life was so desolate and 
barren that such a gift seemed to her as handfuls of gold 
and silver would seem to a beggar were he bidden to 
take them and be rich. 

She stretched her arms out in one quick longing ges- 
ture ; then as suddenly withdrew them, folding them on 
her chest, whilst her face grew very pale. Something of 
its old dark proud ferocity gathered on it. 

“I want no payment,” she said, huskily, and she 
turned to the threshold and crossed it. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


211 


He stayed her with his hand. 

'‘Wait. I did not mean to hurt you. Will you not 
take them as reward 

“No.” 

She spoke almost sullenly ; there was a certain sharp- 
ness and dullness of disappointment at^ her heart. She 
wanted, she wished, she knew not what. But not that 
he should offer her payment. 

“ Can you return to-morrow ? or any other day ?” he 
asked her, thinking of the sketch unfinished on the sheet 
of pinewood. He did not notice the beating of her heart 
under her folded arms, the quick gasp of her breath, the 
change of the rich color in her face. 

“If you wish,” she answered him below her breath. 

“ I do wish, surely. The sketch is all unfinished 
yet.” 

“I will come, then.” 

She moved away from him across the threshold as she 
spoke ; she was not afraid of the people, but she was 
afraid of this strange, passionate sweetness, which 
seemed to fill her veins with fire and make her drunk 
and blind. 

“ Shall I go with you homeward ?” 

She shook her head. 

“But the people who struck you? — they may attack 
you again?” 

She laughed a little ; low in her throat. 

“ I showed them a knife ! — they are timid as hares.” 

“ You are always by yourself?” 

“ Always.” 

She drew herself with a rapid movement from him and 
sprang into her boat where it rocked amidst the rushes 
against the steps ; in another instant she had thrust it 
from its entanglement in the reeds, and pulled with swift, 
steady strokes down the stream into the falling shadows 
of the night. 

“ You will come back ?” he called to her, as the first 
stroke parted the water. 

“ Yes,” she answered him ; and the boat shot forward 
into the shadow. 

Night was near and the darkness soon inclosed it; the 


212 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


beat of the oars sounding faintly through the silence of 
the evening. 

There was little need to exact the promise from her. 

Like Persephone she had eaten of the fatal pome- 
granate-seed, which, whether she would or no, would 
make her leave the innocence of youth, and the light of 
the sun and the blossoms of the glad green springtime 
world, and draw her footsteps backward and downward 
to that hell which none, — once having entered it, — can 
ever more forsake. 

She drifted away from him into the shadows of even- 
ing as they died from the shore and the stream into the 
gloom of the night. 

He thought no more of pursuing her than he thought 
of chasing the melted shadows. 

Returning to his chaiiiiber he looked for some minutes 
at the panel where it leaned against the wall, catching 
the first pallid moon-gleam of the night. 

“ If she should not come, it will be of little moment,” 
he thought. “ I have nearly enough for remembrance 
there.” 

And he went away from the painting, and took up 
charcoal and turned to those anatomical studies whose 
severity he never spared himself, and for whose perfec- 
tion he pursued the science of form even in the bodies 
of the dead. 

From the moment that his hand touched the stylus he 
forgot her ; for she was no more to him than a chance 
bird that he might have taken from its home among the 
ripe red autumn foliage and caged for awhile to study its 
grace and color, its longing eye and drooping- wing ; and 
then tossed up into the air again when he had done with 
it to find its way to freedom, or to fall into the fowler’s 
snare ; — what matter which ? 

The boat went on into the darkness under the willow 
banks, past the great Calvary, whose lantern was just lit 
and glimmered through the gloom. 

She knew by heart the old familiar way ; and the water 
was as safe to her as the broadest and straightest road at 
noonday. 

She loved it best thus ; dusky : half seen ; muttering 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


2t3 


on through the silence ; full of the shadows of the clouds 
and of the boughs; black as a fresh-dug grave where 
some ruined wall leaned over it ; broken into little silvery 
gleams where it caught the light from a saint’s shrine or 
a smith’s forge. 

By day a river is but the highway of men ; it is but a 
public bridge betwixt the country and the town ; but at 
night it grows mystical, silent, solitary, unreal, with the 
sound of the sea in its murmurings and the peace of death 
in its calm ; at night, through its ceaseless whisperings, 
there always seem to come echoes from all the voices of 
the multitudes of the ocean whence it comes, and from all 
the voices of the multitudes of the city whither it goes. 

It was quite dark when she reached the landing steps ; 
the moon was just rising above the sharp gables of the 
mill-house, and a lautern was living up and down be- 
hind the budded boughs as Clauais Flamma went to and 
fro in his wood-yard. 

At the jar of the boat against the steps he peered 
through the branches, and greeted her with a malignant 
reprimand. He timed her services to the minute; and 
here had been a full half day of the spring weather wasted, 
and lost to him. lie drove her indoors with sharp railing 
and loud^ reproaches ; not waiting for an answer, but 
heaping on her the bitterest terms of reviling that his 
tongue could gather. 

In the kitchen a little low burning lamp lit dully the 
poverty and dreariness of the place, and shed its orange 
rays on the ill-tempered, puckered, gloomy face of the old 
woman Pitchou sitting at her spindle; there was a 
curious odor of sun-dried herbs and smoke-dried fish that 
made the air heavy and pungent ; the great chimney 
yawned black and fireless ; a starveling cat mewed dolor- 
ously above an empty platter; under a tawdry-colored 
print of the Flight into Egypt, there hung on a nail three 
dead blackbirds, shot as they sang the praises of the 
spring; on a dresser, beside a little white basin of holy 
water, there lay a gray rabbit, dead likewise, with limbs 
broken and bleeding from the trap in which it had writhed 
helpless all through the previous night. 

The penury, dullness, and cruelty, the hardness, and 


274 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


barrenness, and unloveliness of this life in which she 
abode, had never struck her with a sense so sharp as that 
which now fell on her; crossing the threshold of this 
dreary place after the shadows of the night, the beauty 
of the gods, the voice of praise, the eyes of Arslan. 

She came into the room, bringing with her the cool 
fragrance of damp earth, wet leaves, and wild flowers; 
the moisture of the evening was on her clothes and hair ; 
her bare feet sparkled with the silvery spray of dew ; her 
eyes had the look of blindness yet of luster that the night 
air lends ; and on her face there was a mingling .of 
puzzled pain and of rapturous dreaming wonder, which 
new thought and fresh feeling had brought there to break 
up its rich darkness into light. 

The old woman, twirling a flaxen thread upon her 
wheel, looked askanc^at her, and mumbled, “Like 
mother, like child.” The old man, catching up the lamp, 
held it against her face, and peered at her under his gray 
bent brows. 

“A whole day wasted !”. he swore for the twentieth 
time, in his teeth. “ Beast I What hast thou to say for 
thyself?” 

The old dogged ferocity gathered over her countenance, 
chasing away the softened perplexed radiance that had 
been newly wakened there. 

“I say nothing,” she answered. 

“ Nothing I nothing !” he echoed after her. “ Then we 
will find a way to make thee speak. Nothing I — when 
three of the clock should have seen thee back hither at 
latest, and five hours since then have gone by without 
account. You have spent it in brawling and pleasure 
— in shame and iniquity — in vice and in violence, thou 
creature of sin I” 

“ Since you know, why ask ?” 

She spoke with steady contemptuous calm. She dis- 
dained to seek refuge from his fury by pleading the 
injuries that the townsfolk had wrought her ; and of the 
house by the river she would not have spoken though 
they had killed her. The storm of his words raged on 
uninterrupted. 

“Five hours, five mortal hours, stolen from me, your 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


275 


lawful work left undone that you may riot in some secret 
abomination that you dare not to name. Say, where you 
have been, what you have done, you spawn of hell, or I 
will wring your throat as I wring a sparrow’s I” 

“ I have done as I chose.” 

She looked him full in the eyes as she spoke, with the 
look in her own that a bull’s have when he lowers his 
head to the charge and attack. 

“As you choose 1 Oh-ho 1 You would speaft as 
queens speak — you ! — a thing less than the worm and the 
emmet. As you choose — you ! — who have not a rag on 
your back, not a crust of rye bread, not a leaf of salad to 
eat, not a lock of hay for your bed, that is not mine — 
mine — mine. As you choose. You ! — you thing begotten 
in infamy; you slave; you beggar; you sloth I You 
are nothing — nothing — less than the blind worm that 
crawls in- the sand. You have the devil that bred you in 
you, no doubt ; but it shall go hard if I cannot conquer 
him when I bruise your body and break your will.” 

As he spoke he seized, to strike, her ; in his hand he 
already gripped an oak stick that he had brought in with 
him from his timber-yard, and he raised it to rain blows 
on her, expecting no other course than that dumb, passive, 
scornful submission with which she had hitherto accepted 
whatsoever he had chosen to do against her. 

But the creature, silent and stirless, who before bad 
stood to receive his lashes as though her body were of 
bronze or wood, that felt not, was changed. A leonine 
and superb animal sprang up in full rebellion. She started 
out of his grasp, her lithe form springing from his seizure 
as a willow-bough that has been bent to earth springs 
back, released, into the air. 

She caught the staff in both her hands, wrenched it by 
a sudden gesture from him, and flung it away to the 
farther end of the chamber ; then she turned on him as a 
hart turns brought to bay. 

Her supple body was erect like a young pine ; her eyes 
flashed with a luster he had never seen in them ; the 
breath came hard and fast through her dilated nostrils. 

“ Touch me again !” she cried aloud, while her voice 
rang full and imperious through the stillness. “ Touch 


216 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


me again ; and by the heaven and hell you prate of, I 
will kill you I” 

So sudden was the revolt, so sure the menace, that the 
old man dropped his hands and stood and gazed at her 
aghast and staring; not recognizing the mute, patient, 
doglike thing that he had beaten at his will, in this 
stern, fearless, splendid, terrible creature, who faced him 
in all the royalty of wrath, in all the passion of insur- 
rection. 

lie could not tell what had altered her, what had 
wrought this transformation, what had changed her as by 
sorcery ; he could not tell that what had aroused a human 
soul in her had been the first human voice that she had 
listened to in love ; he could not tell that her body had 
grown sacred to her because a stranger had called her 
beautiful, and that her life for the first time had acquired 
a worth and dignity in her sight because one man had 
deemed it fair. 

He could not tell ; he could only see that for the first 
time his slave had learned somewhere, and in somewise, 
what freedom meant ; and had escaped huu. This alone 
he saw; and, seeing it, was startled and afraid. 

She waited, watching him some moments, with cold 
eyes of disdain, in which'a smouldering fire slept, ready 
to burst into an all-devouring flame. 

There was not a sound in the place; the woman spin- 
ning stopped her wheel, wondering in a half-stupid, sav- 
age fashion ; the lean cat ceased its cries ; there was only 
the continual swish of the water in the sluices under the 
wall without, and the dull ticking of an old Black Forest 
clock, that kept a fitful measure of the days and nights in 
its cracked case of painted wood, high up, where the 
thyme, and the sage, and the onions hung among the 
twisted rafters. 

Folle-Farine stood still, her left hand resting on her 
hip, her lips curved scornfully and close, her face full of 
passion, which she kept still as the dead birds hanging 
on the wall ; whilst all the time the tawny smoky hues 
of the oil-lamp were wavering with an odd fantastic 
play over her head and limbs. 

Before this night she had always taken every blow and 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


277 


stripe patiently, without vengeance, without effort, as she 
saw the mule and the dog, the horse and tlie ox, take 
theirs in their pathetic patience, in their noble fortitude. 
She had thought that such were her daily portion as much 
as was the daily bread she broke. 

But now, since she had awakened with the smile of the 
gods upon her, now she felt that sooner than endure 
again that indignity, that outrage, she would let her 
tyrant kill her in his hjfcte, if so he chose, and cast her 
body to the mill-stream, moaning through the trees be- 
neath the moon ; the water, at least, would bear her with 
it, tranquil and undefiled, beneath the old gray walls and 
past the eyes of Arslan. 

There w’as that in her look which struck dumb the 
mouth, and held motionless the arm, of Claudis Flamma. 

Caustic, savage, hard as his own ash staff though ho 
was, he was for the moment paralyzed and unmanned. 
Some vague sense of shame stirred heavily in him ; some 
vague remembrance passed over him, that, whntsoevcr 
else she might be, she had been once borne in his daugh- 
ter’s bosom, and kissed by his daughter’s lips, and sent 
to him by a dead woman’s will, with a dead woman’s 
wretchedness and loneliness as her sole birth-gifts. 

He passed his hands over his eyes with a blinded ges- 
ture, staring hard at her in the dusky lamp-light. 

lie was a strong and bitter old man, made cruel by one 
great agony, and groping his way savagely through a 
dark, hungry, superstitious, ignorant life. But in that 
moment he no more dared to touch her than he would 
have dared to tear down the leaden Christ from off* its 
crucifix, and trample it under foot, and spit on it. 

He turned away, muttering in his throat, and kicking 
the cat from his path, while he struck out the light with 
his staff. 

‘‘ Get to thy den,” he said, with a curse. “We are 
abed too late. To-morrow I will deal with thee.” 

She went without a word out of the dark kitchen and 
up the ladder-like stairs, up to her lair in the roof. She 
said nothing; it was not in her nature fb threaten twice, 
or twice protest ; but in her heart she knew that neither 
the next day, nor any other day, should that which Ars- 

24 


278 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


]kn bad called “ beauty,” be stripped and struck whilst life 
was in her to preserve it by death from that indignity. 

From the time of her earliest infancy, she had been 
used to bare her shoulders to the lash, and take the 
stripes as food and wages ; she had no more thought to 
resist them than the brave hound, who fears no foe on 
earth, has to resist his master’s blows ; the dull habits of 
a soulless bondage had been too strong on her to be 
lightly broken, and the resignation of the loyal beasts 
that were her comrades, had been the one virtue that she 
had seen to follow. 

But now at length she had burst her bonds, and had 
claimed her freedom. 

She had tasted the freshness of liberty, and the blood 
burned like fire in her face as she remembered the patience 
and the shame of the years of her slavery. 

There was no mirror in her little room in the gabled 
eaves ; all the mirror she had ever known had been that 
which she had shared with the water-lilies, when to- 
gether she and they had leaned over the smooth dark 
surface of the mill-pond. But the moon streamed clearly 
through the one unshuttered window, a moon full and 
clear, and still cold ; the springtide moon, from which 
the pale primroses borrow those tender hues of theirs, 
which never warm or grow deeper, however golden be 
the sun that may shine. 

Its clear colorless crescent went sailing past the little 
square lattice hole in the wall ; masses of gorgeous cloud, 
white and black, swept by in a fresh west wind ; the 
fresh breath of a spring night chased away the heat and 
languor of the day ; the smell of all the blossoms of the 
spring rose up from wood and orchard ; the cool, drowsy 
murmuring of the mill-stream beneath was the only 
sound on the stillness, except when now and then there 
came the wild cry of a mating owl. 

The moonbeams fell about her where she stood ; and 
she looked down on her smooth skin, her glistening 
shoulders, her lustrous and abundant hair, on which the 
wavering light flayed and undulated. The most deli- 
cious gladness that a woman’s life can know was in 
tumult in her, conflicting with the new and deadly sense 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


2:9 


of shame and ignorance. She learned that she was 
beautiful, at the same time that she awoke to the knowl- 
edge of her dumb, lifeless slavish inferiority to all other 
human things, 

“Beautiful!” she muttered to herself, “only as a 
poppy, as a snake, as a night-moth are beautiful — beau- 
tiful and without fragrance, or sweetness, or worth!” 

And her heart* was heavy, even amidst all its pleasure 
and triumph, heavy with a sense of utter ignorance and 
utter worthlessness. 

The poppy was snapped asunder as a weed, the snake 
was shunned and cursed for his poison, the night-moth 
was killed because his nature had made him dwell in the 
darkness; none of the three might have any fault in 
truth in them; all of the three might have only the livery 
of evil, and no more ; might be innocent, and ask only 
to breathe and live for a little brief space in their world, 
which men called God’s world. Yet were they con- 
demned by men, and slain, being what they were, al- 
though God made them. 

Even so she felt, without reasoning, had it been and 
would it be, with herself. 


CHAPTER IV. 

In the room below, the old Norman woman, who did 
not fear her taskmaster, unbarred the shutter to let the 
moon shine in the room, and by its light put away her 
wheel and work, and cut a halved lettuce up upon a 
platter, with some dry bread, and ate them for her 
supper. 

The old man knelt down before the leaden image, and 
joined his knotted hands, and prayed in a low, fierce, 
eager voice, while the heavy pendulum of the clock 
swung wearily to and fro. 

The clock kept fitful and uncertain time ; it had been 
so long imprisoned in the gloom there among the beams 
and cobwebs, and in this place life was so dull, so color- 


280 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


less, so torpid, that it seemed to have forgotten how 
time truly went, and to wake up now and then with a 
shudder of remembrance, in which its works ran madly 
down. 

The old woman ended her supper, munching the 
lettuce-leaves thirstily in her toothless mouth, and not 
casting so much as a crumb of the crusts to the cat, who 
pitifully watched, and mutely implored, with great raven- 
ous amber-circled eyes. Then she took her stick and 
crept out of the kitchen, her wooden shoes clacking loud 
on the bare red bricks. 

“ Prayer did little to keep holy the other one,” she mut- 
tered. “ Unless, indeed, the devil heard and answered.” 

But Claudis Flamma for all that prayed on, entreat- 
ing the mercy and guidance of Heaven, whilst the gore 
dripped from the dead rabbit, and the silent song-birds 
hung stiff upon the nail. 

“ Thou hast a good laborer,” said the old woman 
Pitchou, with curt significance, to her master, meeting 
him in the raw of the dawn of the morrow, as he drew 
the bolts from his house-door. “ Take heed that thou 
dost not drive her away, Flamma. One may beat a sad- 
dled mule safely, but hardly so a wolf’s cub.” 

She passed out of the door as she spoke with mop and 
pail to wash down the paved court outside ; but her words 
abode with her master. 

He meddled no more with the wolf’s cnb. 

When Folle-Farine came down the stairs in the crisp, 
cool, sweet-smelling spring morning that was breaking 
through the mists over the land and water, he motioned 
to her to break her fast with the cold porridge left from 
overnight, and looking at her from under his bent brows 
with a glance that had some apprehension underneath its 
anger, apportioned her a task for the early day with a few 
bitter words of command ; but he molested her no further, 
nor referred ever so faintly to the scene of the past night. 

She ate her poor and tasteless meal in silence, and set 
about her appointed labor without protest. So long as 
she should eat his bread, so long she said to herself would 
she serve him. Thus much the pride and honesty of her 
nature taught her was his due. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


281 


He watched her furtively under his shaggy eyebrows. 
His instinct told him that this nameless, dumb, captive, 
desert animal, which he had bound as a beast of burden to 
his mill-wheels, had in some manner learned her strength, 
and would not long remain content to be thus yoked and 
^driven. He had blinded her with the blindness of igno- 
rance, and goaded her with the goad of ignominy ; but 
for all that, some way her bandaged eyes had sought and 
found the light, some way her numbed hide had thrilled 
and swerved beneath the barb. 

“ She also is a saint; let God take her !’^ said the old 
man to himself in savage irony, as he toiled among his 
mill-gear and his sacks. 

His heart was ever sore and in agony because his God 
had cheated him, letting him hold as purest and holiest 
among women the daughter who had betrayed him. In 
his way he prayed still ; but chiefly his prayer was a 
passionate upbraiding, a cynical reproach. She — his be- 
loved, his marvel, his choicest of maidens, his fairest and 
coldest of virgins — had escaped him and duped him, and 
been a thing of passion and of foulness, of treachery and 
of lust, all the while that he had worshiped her. There- 
fore he hated every breathing thing ; therefore he slew the 
birds in their song, the insects in their summer bravery, 
the lamb in its gambols, the rabbit in' its play amidst the 
primroses. Therefore he cried to the God whom he still 
believed in, “Thou lettest that which was pure escape 
me to be defiled and be slaughtered, and now Thou lettest 
that which is vile escape me to become beautiful and free 
and strong I” And now and then, in this woe of his 
which was so pitiful and yet so brutal, he glanced at her 
where she labored among the unbudded vines and leafless 
fruit trees, and whetted a sickle on the whirling grindstone, 
and felt its edge, and thought to himself, “ She was devil- 
begotten. Would it not be well once and for all to rid men 
of her For, he reasoned, being thus conceived in infamy 
and branded from her birth upward, how should she be 
ever otherwise than to men a curse ? 

Where she went at her labors, to and fro among the 
bushes and by the glancing water, she saw the steel hook 
and caught his sideway gaze, and read his meditation. 

24 * 


282 


FOLLE-FARINE, . 


She laughed, and did not fear. Only she thought, 
“ He shall not do it till I have been back there.'' 

Before the day was done, thither she went. 

He had kept her close since the sunrise. 

Not sending her out on any of the errands to and fro the 
country, which had a certain pleasure to her, because she 
gained" by them liberty and air, and the contentment of 
swift movement against fresh blowing winds. Nor did 
he send her to the town. He employed her through ten 
whole hours in outdoor garden labor, and in fetching and 
carrying from his yard to his lofts, always within sight 
of his own quick eye, and within call of his harsh voice. 

She did not revolt. She did what he bade her do 
swiftly and well. There was no fault to find in any of 
her labors. 

When the last sack was carried, the last sod turned, 
the last burden borne, the sun was sinking, he bade her 
roughly go indoors and winnow last year’s wheat in the 
store chambers till he should bid her cease. 

She came and stood before him, her .eyes very quiet in 
their look of patient strength. 

“ I have worked from daybreak through to sunset,” 
she said, slowly, to him. “ It is enough for man and 
beast. The rest T claim.” 

Before he could reply she had leaped the low stone 
wall that parted the timber-yard from the orchard, and 
was out of sight, flying far and fast through the twilight 
of the boughs. 

He muttered a curse, and let her go. His head drooped 
on his breast, his hands worked restlessly on the stone 
coping of the wall, his withered lips muttered in wrath. 

“ There is hell in her,” he said to himself. “ Let her 
go to her rightful home. There is one thing ” 

“ There is one thing ?” echoed the old woman, hanging 
washed linen out to dry on the boughs of the half-bloomed 
almond-shrubs. 

He gave a dreary, greedy, miser’s chuckle : 

“ One thing ; — I have made the devil work for mo hard 
and well ten whole years through 1” 

“ The devil I” mumbled the woman Pitchou, in con- 
temptuous iteration. “ Dost think the devil was ever 


FOLLE-FARINE, 


283 


such a fool as to work for thy wage' of blows and of black 
bread? Why, he rules the world, they say! And how 
should he rule unless he paid his people well ?” 

Folle-Farine fled on, through the calm woodlands, 
through the pastures where the leek herds dreamed theii 
days away, through the young wheat and the springing 
colza, and the little fields all bright with promise of the 
spring, and all the sunset’s wealth of golden light. 

The league was but as a step to her, trained as her 
muscles were to speed and strength until her feet were 
as fleet as are the doe’s. When she had gained her goal 
then only she paused, stricken with a sudden shyness 
and terror of what she hardly knew. 

An instinct, rather than a thought, turned her towards 
a little grass-hidden pool behind the granary, whose 
water nev^er stirred, save by a pigeon’s rosy foot, or by 
a timid plover’s beak, was motionless and clear as any 
mirror. 

Instinct, rather than thought, bent her head over it, 
and taught her eyes to seek her own reflection. It had 
a certain wonder in it to her now that fascinated her with 
a curious indefinable attraction. For the first time in her 
life she had thought of it, and done such slight things as she 
could to make it greater. They were but few, — linen 
a little whiter and less coarse — the dust shaken from her 
scarlet sash ; her bronze-hued haii burnished to richer dark- 
ness; a knot of wild narcissi in her bosom gathered with 
the dew on them as she came through the wood. 

This was all; yet this was something; something 
that showed the dawn of human impulses, of womanly 
desires. As she looked, she blushed for her own foolish- 
ness ; and, with a quick hand, cast the white wood- 
flowers into the center of the pool. It seemed to her now, 
though only a moment earlier she had gatherd them, so 
senseless and so idle to have decked herself with their 
borrowed loveliness. As if for such things as these he 
cared I 

Then, slowly, and with her head sunk, she entered his 
dwelling-place. 

Arslan stood with his face turned from her, bending 
down over a trestle of wood. 


284 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


He did not hear her as she approached ; she drew 
quite close to him and looked where she saw that he 
looked ; down on the wooden bench. What she saw 
were a long falling stream of dight-hued hair, a gray still 
face, closed eyes, and naked limbs, which did not stir 
save when his hand moved them a little in their posture, 
and which then dropped from his hold like lead. . 

She did not shudder nor exclaim ; she only looked with • 
quiet and incurious eyes. In the life of the poor such a 
sight has neither novelty nor terror. 

It did not even seem strange to her to see it in such a 
place. He started slightly as he grew sensible of her 
presence, and turned, and threw a black cloth over the 
trestle. 

“ Do not look there,’’ he said to her. I had forgotten 
you. Otherwise ” 

“ I have looked there. It is only a dead woman.” 

“ Only 1 What makes you say that ?” 

“ I do not know. There are many — are there not ?” 

He looked at her in surprise seeing that this utter lack 
of interest or curiosity was true and not assumed ; that 
awe, and reverence, and dread, and all emotions which 
rise in human hearts before the sight or memory of death 
were wholly absent from her. 

‘‘ There are many indeed,” he made answer, slowly. 
“Just there is the toughest problem — it is the insect life 
of the world ; it is the clouds of human ephemerae, be- 
‘ gotten one summer day to die the next; it is the millions 
on millions of men and women born, as it were, only to 
be choked by the reek of cities, and then fade out to 
nothing; it is the numbers that kill one’s dreams of im- 
mortality I” 

She looked wearily up at him, not comprehending, and, 
indeed, he had spoken to himself and not to her; she 
lifted up one corner of the cere cloth and gazed a little 
while at the dead face, the face of a girl young, and in a 
slight, soft, youthful manner, fair. 

“ It is Fortis, the ragpicker’s daughter,” she said, in- 
differently, and dropped back the sheltering cloth. She 
did not know what nor why she envied, and yet she was 
jealous of this white dead thing that abode there so 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


285 


peacefully and so happily with the caress of his touch on 
its calm limbs. 

“Yes,” he answered her. “It is his daughter. She 
died twenty hours ago, — of low fever, they say — famine, 
no doubt ” 

“ Why do you have her here ?” She felt no sorrow 
for the dead girl ; the girl had mocked and jibed lier 
many a time as a dark witch devil-born ; she only felt a 
jealous and restless hatred of her intrusion here. 

“ The dead sit to me often,” he said, with a certain 
smile that had sadness and yet coldness in it. 

“ Why?” 

“ That they may tell me the secrets of life.” 

“ Do they tell tliem ?” 

“A few; — most they keep. See, — I paint death; I 
must watch it to paint it. It is dreary work, you think ? 
It is not so to me. The surgeon seeks his kind of truth ; 
I seek mine. The man Fortis came to me on the river- 
side last night. He said to me, ‘ You like studying the 
deiid, they say ; have my dead for a copper coin. I am 
starving; — and it cannot hurt her.’ So I g'ave him the 
coin — though I am as poor as he — and I took the dead 
woman Why do you look like that? It is nothing to 
you'; the girl shall go to her grave when I have done 
with her.” 

She bent her head in assent. It was nothing to her; 
and yet it filled her with a cruel feverish jealousy, it 
weighed on her with a curious pain. 

She did not care for the body lying, there — it had been 
but the other day that the dead girl had shot her lips out 
at her in mockery and called her names from a balcony in 
an old ruined house as the boat drifted past it; but there 
passed over her a dreary shuddering remembrance that 
she, likewise, might one day lie thus before him and be 
no more to him than this. The people said that he who 
studied death, brought death. 

The old wistful longing that had moved her, when 
Marcellin had died, to lay her down in the cool water and 
let it take her to long sleep and to complete forgetfulness 
returned to her again. Since the dead were of value to 
him, best, she thought, be of them, and lie here in that 


286 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


dumb still serenity, caressed by bis touch and bis regard. 
For, in a manner, sbe was jealous of this woman, as of 
some living rival wbo bad, in ber absence, filled her place 
and been of use to, him and escaped bis thought. 

Any ghastliness or inhumanity in this search of his for 
the truth of his art amidst the frozen limbs and rigid 
muscles of a corpse, never occurred to her. To her he was 
like a deity ; to her these poor weak shreds of broken 
human lives, these fragile empty vessels, whose wine of 
life had been spilled like water that runs to waste, seemed 
beyond measurement to be exalted when deemed by him 
of value. 

She would have thought no more of grudging them if 
his employ and in his service than priests of Isis or of 
Eleusis would have begrudged the sacrificed lives on 
beasts and birds that smoked upon their temple altars. 
To die at his will and be of use to him ; — this seemed 
to her the most supreme glory fate could hold ; and she 
envied the ragpicker’s daughter lying there in such calm 
content. 

“ Why do you look so much at her ?” he said at length. 
“ I shall do her no harm ; if I did, what would she 
know 

“ I was not thinking of her,” she answered slowly, 
with a certain perplexed pain upon her face. “ I was 
thinking I might be of more use to you if I were dead. 
You must not kill me, because men would hurt you for 
that ; but, if you wish, I will kill myself to-night. 1 have 
often thought of it lately.” 

He started at the strangeness and the suddenness of 
the words spoken steadily and with perfect sincerity and 
simplicity in the dialect of the district, with no sense in 
their speaker of anything unusual being offered in them. 
His eyes tried to search the expression of her face with 
greater interest and curiosity than they had ever done ; 
and they gained from their study but little. 

For the innumerable emotions awakening in her were 
only dimly shadowed there, and had in them the con- 
fusion of all imperfect expression. He could not tell 
whether here was a great soul struggling through the 
bonds of an intense ignorance and stupefaction, or whether 


FOLLE-FARIl^E. 


287 


there were only before him an animal perfect, wonder- 
fully perfect, in its physical development, but mindless as 
any clod of earth. 

He did not know how to answer heft 

“ Why should you think of death he said at last. 

“ Is your life so bitter to you V' 

Slie stared at him. 

“ Is a beaten dog’s bitter? or is a goaded ox’s sweet?” 

“ But you are so young, — and you are handsome, and 
a woman ?” 

She laughed a little. 

“ A woman I Marcellin said that.” 

“ Well 1 What is there strange in saying it ?” 

She pointed to the corpse w^hich the last sunrays were 
brightening, till the limbs w’ere as alabaster and the hair 
was as gold. 

“ That was a woman — a creature that is white and . 
rose, and has yellow hair and laughs in the faces of men, 
and has a mother that kisses her lips, and sees the chil- 
dren come to play at her knees. I am not one. I am a 
devil, they say.” 

His mouth smiled with a touch of sardonic humor, 
whose acrimony and whose irony escaped her. 

“ What have you done so good, or so great, that your 
world should call you so ?” 

Her eyes clouded and lightened alternately. 

“You do not believe that I am a devil?” 

“How should I tell ? If you covet the title claim it, 
you have a right, — you are a woman !” 

“ Always a woman I” she muttered with disappoint- 
ment and with impatience. 

“ Always a woman,” he echoed as he pointed to the 
god Hermes. “ And there is your creator.” 

“ HeP^ 

She looked rapidly and wistfully at the white-winged 
god. 

“Yes. He made Woman; for he made her mind out 
of treachery and her words out of the empty wind. Ile- 
phffistus made her heart, fusing for it brass and iron. 
Their work has worn well. It has not changed in all 
these ages. But what is your history ? Go and lie yon- 


288 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


der, where you were last night, and tell me your story 
while I work.” 

She obeyed him and told him what she knew ; lying 
there, where he Ifad motioned her, in the shadow under 
the figures of the three grandsons of Chaos. He listened, 
and wrought on at her likeness. 

The story, as she told it in her curt imperfect wmrds, 
was plain enough to him, though to herself obscure. It 
had in some little measure a likeness to his own. 

It awakened a certain compassion for her in his heart, 
which was rarely moved to anything like pity. For to 
him nature was so much and man so little, the one so 
majestic and so exhaustless, the other so small and so 
ephemeral, that human wants and human woes touched 
him but very slightly. Ilis own, even at their darkest, 
moved him rather to self-contempt than to self-compassion, 
for these were evils of the body and of the senses. 

As a boy he had had no ear to the wail of the frozen and 
famishing people wandering homeless over the waste of 
drifted snow, where but the night before a village had 
nestled in the mountain hollow ; all his senses had been 
given in a trance of awe and rapture to the voices of the 
great winds sweeping down from the heights through the 
pine-forests, and the furious seas below gnashing and 
raging on the wreck-strewn strand. It was with these 
last that he had had kinship and communion: these en- 
dured always; but for the men they slew, what were 
they more in the great sum of time than forest-leaves or 
ocean driftwood ? 

And, indeed, to those who are alive to the nameless, 
universal, eternal soul which breathes in all the grasses 
of the lields, and beams in the eyes of all creatures of 
earth and air, and throbs in the living light of palpitating 
stars, and thrills through the young sap of forest trees, 
and stirs in the strange loves of wind-borne plants, and 
hums in every song of the bee, and burns in every quiver 
of the flame, and peoples with sentient myriads every 
drop of dew that gathers on a harebell, every bead of 
water that ripples in a brook — to these the mortal life of 
man can seem but little, save at once the fiercest and the 
feeblest thing that does exist; at once the most cruel and 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


289 


the most impotent ; tyrant of dircsj, destruction and bonds- 
man of lowest captivity. Hence pity entered very little 
into his thoughts at any time ; the i)erpetual torture of life 
did indeed perplex him, as it perplexes every thinking 
creature, with wonder at the universal bitterness that 
taints all creation, at the universal deatt] whereby all forms 
of life are nurtured, at the universal anguish of all exist- 
ence which daily and nightly assails the unknown God 
in piteous protest at the inexorable laws of inexplicable 
luiseries and mysteries. But because such sulfering was 
thus universal, therefore he almost ceased to feel pity for 
it; of the two he pitied the beasts far more than the 
human kind: — the horse staggering beneath the lash in 
all the feebleness of hunger, lameness, and old age ; the ox 
bleeding from the goad on the hard furrows, or stumbling 
through the hooting crowd, blind, footsore and shivering 
to its last home in the slaughter-house ; the dog, yielding 
up its noble life inch by inch under the tortures of the 
knife, loyally licking the hand of the vivisector while he 
drove his probe through its quivering nerves ; the unut- 
terable hell in which all these gentle, kindly and long- 
suffering creatures dwelt for the pleasure or the vanity, 
the avarice or the brutality of men, — these he pitied per- 
petually, with a tenderness for them that was the softest 
thing in all his nature. 

But when he saw men and women suffer he often 
smiled, not ill j)leased. It seemed to him that the worst 
they could ever endure was only such simple retribution, 
such mere fair measure of all the agonies they cast broad- 
cast. 

Therefore he pitied her now for what repulsed all others 
from her — that she had so little apparent humanity, and 
that she was so like an animal in her strength and weak- 
ness, and in her ignorance of both her rights and wrongs. 
Therefore he pitied her ; and there was that in her 
strange kind of beauty, in her half-savage, half-timid 
attitudes, in her curt, unlearned, yet picturesque speech, 
which attracted him. Besides, although solitude was his 
preference, he had been for more than two years utterly 
alone, his loneliness broken only by the companionship 
of boors, with whom he had not had one thought in com- 

25 


290 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


inon. The extreme poverty in which the latter months 
of his life had been passed, had excluded him from all 
human society, since he could have sought none without 
betraying his necessities. The alms-seeking visit of some 
man even more famished and desperate than himself, such 
as the ragpicker who had brought the dead girl to him for 
a few brass coins, had been the only relief to the endless 
monotony of his existence, a relief that made such change 
in it worse than its continuance. 

In Folle-Farine, for the first time in two long, bitter, 
colorless, hated years, there was something which aroused 
his interest and his curiosity, some one to whom impulse 
led him to speak the thoughts of his mind with little con- 
cealment. She seemed, indeed, scarcely more than a wild 
beast, half tamed, inarticulate, defiant, shy, it might be 
even, if aroused, ferocious; but it was an animal whose 
eyes dilated in quickening sympathy with all his moods, 
and an animal whom, at a glance, he knew would, in time, 
crawl to him or combat for him as he chose. 

He talked to her now, much on the same impulse that 
moves a man, long imprisoned, to converse with the spider 
that creeps on the floor, with the mouse that drinks from 
his pitcher, and makes him treat like an intelligent being 
the tiny flower growing blue and bright between the 
stones, which is all that brings life into his loneliness. 

The prison door once flung open, the sunshine once 
streaming across the darkness, the fetters once struck off, 
the captive once free to go out again among his fellows, 
then — the spider is left to miss the human love that it 
has learnt, the mouse is left to die of thirst, the little 
blue flower is left to fade out as it may in the stillness 
and the gloom alone. Then they are nothing : but while 
the prison doors are still locked they are much. 

Here the jailer was poverty, and the prison was the 
world’s neglect, and they who lay bound were high hopes, 
great aspirations, impossible dreams, immeasurable am- 
bitions, all swathed and fettered, and straining to be free 
with dumb, mad force against bonds that would not break. 

And in these, in their bondage, there were little pa- 
tience, or sympathy, or softness, and to them, even nature 
itself at times looked horrible, though never so horrible. 


FOLLE-FARTNE. 


291 


because never so despicable, as humanity. Yet, still even 
in these an instinct of companionship abided ; and this 
creature, with a woman’s beauty, and an animal’s fierce- 
ness and innocence, was in a manner welcome. 

“ Why were women ever made, then ?” she said, after 
awhile, following, though imperfectly, the drift of his last 
words, where she lay stretched obedient to his will, under 
the shadow of the wall. 

He smiled the smile of one who recalls some story he 
has heard from the raving lips of some friend fever- 
stricken. 

“ Once, long ago, in the far East, there dwelt a saint in 
the desert. He was content in his solitude : he was holy 
and at peace : the honey of the wild bee and the fruit of 
the wild tamarisk-tree sufficed to feed him ; the lions were 
his ministers, and the hyenas were his slaves ; the eagle 
flew down for his blessing, and the winds and the storms 
were his messengers; he had killed the beast in him, and 
the soul alone had dominion ; and day and night, upon 
the lonely air, he breathed the praise of God. 

“Years went with him thus, and he grew old, and he 
said to himself, ‘ I have lived content ; so shall I die puri- 
fied, and ready for the kingdom of heaven.’ For it was 
in the day when that wooden god, who hangs on the 
black cross yonder, was not a lifeless effigy, as now, but 
had a name of power and of might, adjuring which, his 
people smiled under torture, and died in the flame, dream- 
ing of a land where the sun never set, and the song 
never ceased, and the faithful forever were at rest. 

“ So the years, I say, went by with him, and he was 
glad and at peace. 

“ One night, when the thunder rolled and the rain tor- 
rents fell, to the door of his cave there came a wayfarer, 
fainting, sickly, lame, trembling with terror of the desert, 
and beseeching him to save her from the panthers. 

“ He was loth, and dreaded to accede to her prayer, 
for he said, ‘ Wheresoever a woman enters, there the con- 
tent of a man is dead.’ But she was in dire distress, and 
entreated him with tears and supplications not to turn 
her adrift for the lightning and the lions to devour: and 
he felt the old human pity steal on him, and he opened 


292 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


the door to her, and bade her enter and be at sanctuary 
there in God’s name. 

“ But when she had entered, age, and sickness, and 
want fell from olf her, her eyes grew as two stars, her 
lips were sweet as the rose of the desert, her limbs had 
the grace of the cheetah, her body had the radiance and 
the fragrance of frankincense on an altar of gold. And 
she laughed in his beard, and cried, saying, ‘ Thou think- 
est thou hast lived, and yet thou hast not loved ! Oh, 
sage 1 oh, saint ! oh, fool, fool, fool I’ Then into his veins 
there rushed youth, and into his brain there came mad- 
ness ; the life he had led seemed but death, and eternity 
loathsome since passionless ; and he stretched his arms to 
her and sought to embrace her, crying, ‘Stay with me, 
though I buy thee with hell.’ And she stayed. 

“ But when the morning broke she left him laughing, 
gliding like a phantom from his arms, and out into the 
red sunlight, and across the desert sand, laughing, laugh- 
ing, always, and mocking him whilst she beckoned. He 
pursued her, chasing her through the dawn, through the 
noon, through the night. He never found her; she had 
vanished as the rose of the rainbow fades out of the sky. 

“ He searched for her in every city, and in every land. 
Some say he searches still, doomed to live on through 
every age and powerless to die.” 

He had a certain power over words as over color. 
Like all true painters, the fiber of his mind was sensu- 
ous and poetic, though the quality of passionate imagi- 
nation was in him welded with a coldness and a stillness 
of temper born in him with his northern blood. He had 
dwelt much in the Asiatic countries, and much of the 
philosophies and much of the phraseology of the P]ast re- 
mained with him. Something even there seemed in him 
of the mingled, asceticism and sensualism, the severe self- 
denial, with the voluptuous fancy of the saints who once 
had peopled the deserts in which he had in turn delighted 
to dwell, free and lonely, scorning women and deserting 
men. He spoke seldom, being l)y nature silent; but 
when he did speak, his language was unconsciously varied 
into picture-like formations. 

She .listened breathless, with the color in her cheeks 


FOLLE-FARTNE. 


293 


and the fire brooding in her eyes, her unformed mind 
catching the swift shadowy allegories of his tale by force 
of the poetic instincts in her. 

No one had ever talked to her thus ; and yet it seemed 
clear to her and beautiful, like the story that the great 
sunflowers told as they swayed to and fro in the light, 
like the song that the bright brook-water sung as it 
purred and sparkled under the boughs. 

“ That is true ?” she said, suddenly, at length. 

“ It is a saint’s story in substance ; it is true in spirit 
for all time.” 

Her breath came with a sharp, swift, panting sound. 
She was blinded with the new light that broke in on her. 

“ If I be a woman, shall I, then, be such a woman as 
that?” 

Arslan rested his eyes on her with a grave, half-sad, 
half-sardonic smile. 

“ Why not ? You are the devil’s daughter, you say. 
Of such are men’s kingdom of heaven I” 

She pondered long upon his answer ; she could not 
comprehend it; she had understood the parable of his 
narrative, yet the passion of it had passed by her, and 
the evil shut in it had escaped her. 

“ Do, then, men love what destroys them ?” she asked, 
slowly. 

“Always I” he made answer, still with that same smile 
as of one who remembers hearkening to the delirious 
ravings round him in a madhouse through which he has 
walked — himself sane — in a bygone time. 

“I do not want love,” she said, suddenly, while her 
brain, half strong, half feeble, struggled to fit her thoughts 
to words. “ I want — I want to have power, as the priest 
has on the people when he says, ‘ Pray I’ and they pray.” 

“ Power I” he echoed, as the devotee echoes the name 
of his god. “Who does not? But do you think the 
woman that tempted the saint had none ? If ever you 
reach that kingdom such power will become yours.” 

A proud glad exultation swept over her face for a 
moment. It quickly faded. She did not believe in a 
future. How many times had she not, since the hand of 
Claudis Flarnma first struck lier, prayed with all the 
25 * 


294 


FOLLE-FAJIIXE. 


passion of a child’s dumb agony that the dominion of her 
Father’s power miglit come to her ? And the great Evil 
had never hearkened. He, whom all men around her 
feared, had made her no sign that he heard, but left her 
to blows, to solitude, to continual hunger, to perpetual 
toil. 

“I have prayed to the devil again and again and he 
will not hear,” she muttered. “ Marcellin says that he 
has ears for all. But for me he has none.” 

“ He has too much to do to hear all. All the nations 
of the earth beseech him. Yonder man on the cross they 
adjure with their mouths indeed ; but it is your god only 
whom in their hearts they worship. See how the Christ 
hangs his head : he is so weary of lip service.” 

“ But since they give the Christ so many temples, why 
do they raise none to the devil ?” 

“ Chut ! No man builds altars to his secret god. 
Look you: I will tell you another story: once, in an 
Eastern land, there was a temple dedicated to all the 
various deities of all the peoples that worshiped under 
the sun. There were many statues and rare ones ; 
statues of silver and gold, of ivory, and agate, and chal- 
cedony, and there were altars raised before all, oii which 
every nation offered up sacriffce and burned incense before 
its divinity. 

‘'Now, no nation would look at the god of another; 
and each people clustered about the feet of its own fetich, 
and glorified it, crying out, ‘ There is no god but this god.’ 

“ The noise was fearful, and the feuds were many, and 
the poor king, whose thought it had been to erect such a 
temple, was confounded, and very sorrowful, and mur- 
mured, saying, ‘I dreamed to beget universal peace and 
tolerance and harmony ; and lo I there come of my 
thought nothing but discord and war.’ 

“ Then to him there came a stranger, veiled, and 
claiming no country, and he said, ‘You were mad to 
dream religion could ever be peace, yet, be not disquieted ; 
give me but a little place and I will erect an altar whereat 
all men shall worship, leaving their own gods.’ 

“ The king gave him permission ; and he raised up a 
simple stone, and on it he wrote, ‘ To the Secret Sin I’ 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


205 


and, being a sorcerer, he wrote with a curious power, that 
showed the. .inscription to the sight of each man, but 
blinded him whilst he gazed on it to all sight of his 
. fellows. 

“ And each man forsook bis god, and came and kneeled 
before this nameless altar, each bowing down before it, 
and each believing himself in solitude. The poor for- 
saken gods stood naked and alone ; there was not one 
man left to worship one of them.” 

She listened ; her eloquent eyes fixed on him, her lips 
parted, her fancy fantastic and full of dreams, strength- 
ened by loneliness, and unbridled through ignorance, 
steeping itself in every irony and every fantasy, and 
every shred of knowledge that Chance, her only teacher, 
cast to her. 

She sat thinking, full of a vague sad pity for that 
denied and forsaken God on the cross, by the river, such 
as s'.e had never felt before, since she had always re- 
garded him as the symbol of cruelty, of famine, and of 
hatred ; not knowing that these are only the colors which 
all deities alike reflect from the hearts of the peoples that 
worship them. 

“If 1 had a god,” she said, suddenly, “if a god 
cared to claim me — I would be proud of his worship 
everywhere.” 

Arslan smiled. 

“ All women have a god ; that is why they are at 
once so much weaker and so much happier than men.” 

“ Who are their gods ?” 

“ Their name is legion. Innocent women make gods 
of their offspring, of their homes, of their housework, of 
their duties; and are as cruel as tigresses meanwhile to 
all outside the pale of their temples. Others — less inno- 
cent — make gods of their own forms and faces ; of bright 
stones dug from the earth, of vessels of gold and silver, 
of purple and fine linen, of p'assions, and vanities, and 
desires ; gods that they consume themselves for in their 
youth, and that they curse, and beat, and upbraid in the 
days of their age. Which of these gods will be yours?” 

She thought awhile. 

“ None of them,” she said at last. 


296 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


“ None ? What will you put in their stead, then 

She thought gravely some moments again. Although 
a certain terse and even poetic utterance was the shape 
which her spoken imaginations naturally took at all times, 
ignorance and solitude had made it hard for her aptly to 
marry her thoughts to words. 

“ I do not know,” she said, wearily. “ Marcellin says 
that God is deaf. He must be deaf — or very cruel. Look ; 
everything lives in pain; and yet no God pities and 
makes an end of the earth. I would — if I were lie. 
Look — at dawn, the other day, I was out iu the wood. 
I came upon a little rabbit in a trap ; a little, pretty, soft 
black-and-white thing, quite young. It was screaming 
ill its horrible misery ; it had been screaming all night. 
Its thighs were broken in the iron teeth ; the trap held it 
tight ; it could not escape, it could only scream — scream — 
scream. All in vain. Its God never heard. When I 
got it free it was mangled as if a wolf had gnawed it ; 
the iron teeth had bitten through the fur, and the flesh, 
and the bone ; it had lost so much blood, and it was in 
so much pain, that it could not live. I laid it down in 
the bracken, and put water to its mouth, and did. what I 
could; but it was of no use. It had been too much hurt. 
It died as the sun rose ; a little, harmless, shy, happy 
thing, you know, that never killed any creature, and only 
asked to nibble a leaf or two, or sleep iu a little round 
hole, and run about merry and free. How can one care 
for a god since all gods let these things be 

Arslan smiled as he heard. 

“Child, — men care for a god only as a god means a 
good to them. Men are heirs of heaven, they say ; and, 
in right of their heritage, they make life hell to every 
living thing that dares dispute the world with them. 
You do not understand that, — tut I You are not human, 
then. If you were human, you would begrudge a blade 
of grass to a rabbit, and arrogate to yourself a lease of 
immortality.” 

She did not understand him; but she felt that she was 
honored by him, and not scorned as others scorned her, 
for being thus unlike humanity. It was a bitter perplex- 
ity to her, this earth on which she had been flung amidst 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


29t 


an alien people ; that she should suffer herself seemed 
little to her, it had become as a second nature; but the 
sufferings of all the innumerable tribes of creation, things 
of tlie woods, and the field, and the waters, and the sky, 
tliat toiled and sweated and were hunted, and persecuted 
and wrenched in torment, and finally perished to gratify 
the appetites or the avarice of humanity — these suffer- 
ings were horrible to her always: inexplicable, hideous, 
unpardonable, — a crime for which she hated God and 
IMan 

“ There is no god pitiful, then ?” she said, at length ; 
“ no god — not one 

“ Only those Three,” he answered her as he motioned 
towards the three brethren that watched above her. 

“ Are they your gods ?” 

A smile that moved her to a certain fear of him passed 
a moment over his mouth. 

“ My gods ? — No. They are the gods of youth and of 
age — not of manhood.” 

“ What is yours, then ?” 

‘‘Mine? — a Moloch who consumes my offspring, yet 
in whose burning brazen hands 1 have put them and 
myself — forever.” 

She looked at him in awe and in reverence. She 
imagined him the priest of some dark and terrible re- 
ligion, for whose sake he passed his years in solitude and 
deprivation, and by whose powers he created the won- 
drous shapes that rose and bloomed around him. 

“Those are gentler gods?” she said, timidly, raising 
her eyes to the brethren above her. “ Do you never — 
will you never — worship them?” 

“I have ceased to worship them. In time — when the 
world has utterly beaten me — no doubt 1 shall pray to 
one at least of them. To that one, see, the eldest of the 
brethren, who holds his torch turned downward.” 

“ And that god is ” 

“ Death !” 

She was silent. 

Was this god not her god also ? Had she not chosen 
him from all the rest and cast her life down at his feet 
for this man’s sake ? 


298 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


“ He must never know, he must never know,” she said 
again in her heart. 

And Thanatos she knew would not betray her ; for 
Thanatos keeps all the secrets of men, — he who alone of 
all the gods reads the truths of men’s souls, and smiles 
and shuts them in the hollow of his hand, and lets the 
braggart Time fly on with careless feet above a million 
graves, telling what lies he will to please the world a 
little space. Thanatos holds silence, and can wait ; for 
him must all things ripeu and to him must all things fall 
at last. 


CHAPTER y. 

When she left him that night, and went homeward, he 
trimmed his lamp and returned to his labors of casting 
and modeling from the body of the ragpicker’s daughter. 
The work soon absorbed him too entirely to leave any 
memory with him of the living woman. He did not 
know — and had he known would not have heeded — that 
instead of going on her straight path back to Yprbs she 
turned again, and, hidden among the rushes upon the 
bank, crouched, half sitting and half kneeling, to watch 
him from the riverside. 

It was all dark and still without ; nothing came near, 
except now and then some hobbled mule turned out to 
forage for his evening meal or some night-browsing cattle 
straying out of bounds. Once or twice a barge went 
slowly and sullenly by, its single light twinkling across 
the breadth of the stream, and the voices of its steersman 
calling huskily through the fog. A drunken peasant 
staggered across the fields singing snatches of a repub- 
lican march that broke roughly on the silence of the 
night. The young lambs bleated to their mothers in the 
meadows, 4nd the bells of the old clock towers in the 
town chimed the quarters with a Laus Deo in which all 
their metal tongues joined musically. 


FOLLE^FARINE. 


299 


She remained there undisturbed among the long grasses 
and the tufts of the reeds, gazing always into the dimly- 
lighted interior where the pale rays of the oil flame lit up 
the white forms of the gods, the black shadows of the 
columns, the shapes of the wrestling lion and the strangled 
gladiator, the ^ay stiff frame and hanging hair of the 
dead body, and the bending figure of Arslan as he stooped 
above the corpse and pursued the secret powers of his 
art into the hidden things of death. 

To her there seemed nothing terrible in a night thus 
spent, in a vigil thus ghastly; it seemed to her only a 
part of his strength thus to make death — meij’s conqueror 
— his servant and his slave; she only begrudged every 
passionless touch that his grasp gave to those frozen and 
rigid limbs wliich he moved to and fro like so much clay ^ 
she only envied with a jealous thirst every cold caress 
that his hand lent to that loose and lifeless hair which he 
swept aside like so much flax. 

He did not see ; he did not know. To him she was no 
more than any bronze-winged, golden-eyed insect that 
should have floated in on a night breeze and been painted 
by him and been cast out again upon the darkness. 

He worked more than half the night — worked until 
the small store of oil he possessed burned itself out, and 
left the hall to the feeble light of a young moon shining 
through dense vapors. He dropped his tools, and rose 
and walked to and fro on the width of the great stone 
floor. His hands felt chilled to the bone with the contact 
of the dead flesh ; his breathing felt oppressed with the 
heavy humid air that lay like ice upon his lungs. 

The dead woman was nothing to him. He had not 
once thought of the youth that had perished in her ; of the 
laughter that hunger had hushed forever on the colorless 
lips; of the passion blushes that had died out forever on 
the ashen cheeks ; of the caressing hands of mother and 
of lover that must have wandered among that curling 
hair; of the children that should have slept on that white 
breast so smooth and cold beneath his hand. For these 
he cared nothing, and thought as little. The dead girl 
for him bad neither sex nor story ; and he had studied all 
phases and forms of death too long to be otherwise than 


300 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


familiar with them all. Yet a certain glacial despair 
froze his heart as he left her body lying there in the 
flicker of the struggling moonbeams, and, himself, pacing 
to and fro in his solitude, suffered a greater bitterness 
than death in his doom of poverty and of obscurity. 

The years of his youth had gone in fruftless labor, and 
the years of his manhood were gliding after them, and 
yet he had failed so utterly to make his mark upon his 
generation that he could only maintain his life by the 
common toil of the common hand-laborer, and, if he died 
on the morrow, there would not be one hand stretched 
out to save any one work of his creation from the house- 
wife’s fires or the lime-burner’s furnace. 

Cold to himself as to all others, he said bitterly in 
his soul, “What is Failure except Feebleness? And 
what is it to miss one’s mark except to aim wildly and 
weakly ?” 

lie told himself that harsh and inexorable truth a score 
of times, again and again, as he walked backward and 
forward in the solitude which only that one dead woman 
shared. 

lie told himself that he was a madman, a fool, who 
spent his lifetime in search and worship of a vain eidolon, 
lie told himself that there must be in him some radical 
weakness, some inalienable fault, that he could not in all 
these years find strength enough to compel the world of 
men to honor him. Agony overcame him as he thought 
and thought and thought, until he scorned himself; the 
supreme agony of a strong nature that for once mistrusts 
itself as feebleness, of a great genius that for once de- 
spairs of itself as self-deception. 

Had he been the fool of his vanities all his youth up- 
ward ; and had his fellow-men been only wise and clear 
of sight when they had denied him and refused to' see ex- 
cellence in any work Of his hand? Almost, he told him- 
self, it must be so. 

He paused by the open casement, and looked outward, 
scarcely knowing what he did. The mists were heavy ; 
the air was loaded with damp exhalations ; the country 
was profoundly still ; above-head only a few stars glim- 
mered here and there through the haze. The peace, 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


301 


the silence, the obscurity were abhorrent to him ; they 
seemed to close upon him, and imprison him ; far away 
were the lauds and the cities of men that he had known, 
far away were all the color and the strength and the 
strain and the gloiy of living ; it seemed to him as though 
he were dead also, like the woman on the trestle yonder ; 
dead in some deep sea-grave where the weight of the 
waters kept him down and held his hands powerless, 
and shut his eyelids from all sight, while the living 
voices and the living footsteps of men came dimly on 
his ear from the world above; voices, not one of which 
uttered his name j footsteps, not one of which paused by 
his tomb. 

It grew horrible to him — this death in life, to which 
in the freshness of manhood he found himself condemned. 

. “ Oh, God I” he, who believed in no God, muttered half 
aloud, “ let me be without love, wealth, peace, health, 
gladness, all my life long — let me be crippled, childless, 
beggared, hated to the latest end^of my days. Give me 
only to be honored in my works ; give me only a name 
that men cannot, if they wish, let die.” 

Whether any hearer greater than man heard the prayer, 
who shall say? Daily and nightly, through all the gen- 
erations of the world, the human creature implores from 
his Creator the secrets of his existence, and asks in vain. 
There is one answer indeed; but it is the answer of all 
the million races of the universe, w^hich only cry, “ We 
are born but to perish ; is Humanity a thing so high and 
pure that it should claim exemption from the universal 
and inexorable law ?” 

One mortal listener heard, hidden among the hollow 
sighing rushes, bathed in the moonlight and the mists; 
and the impersonal passion which absorbed him found 
echo in this inarticulate imperfect soul, just wakened in 
its obscurity to the first faint meanings of its mortal life 
as a nest-bird rouses in the dawn to the first faint pipe of 
its involuntary cry. 

She barely knew what he sought, what he asked, and 
yet her heart ached with his desire, and shared the bitter- 
ness of his denial. What kind of life he craved in the 
ages to come ; what manner of remembrance he yearned 

26 


302 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


for from unborn races of man ; what thing it was that he 
besought should be given to him in the stead of all love, 
all peace, all personal woes and physical delights, she did 
not know ; the future to her had no meaning; and the 
immortal fame that he craved was an unknown god, of 
whose worship she had no comprehension ; and yet she 
vaguely felt that what he sought was that his genius still 
should live when his body should be destroyed, and that 
those mute, motionless, majestic shapes which arose at 
his bidding should become characters and speak for him 
to all the generations of men when his own mouth should 
be sealed dumb in death. 

This hunger of the soul which unmanned and tortured 
him, though the famine of the flesh had had no power to 
move him, thrilled her with the instinct of its greatness. 
This thirst of the mind, which could not slake itself in 
common desire or sensual satiety, or any peace and pleas- 
ure of the ordinary life of man, had likeness in it to that 
dim instinct which had made her nerves throb at the 
glories of the changing skies, and her eyes fill with tears 
at the sound of a bird’s singing in the darkness of dawn, 
and her heart yearn with vain nameless longing as for 
some lost land, for some forgotten home, in the radiant 
hush of earth and air at sunrise. He suffered as she 
suffered ; and a sweet newborn sense of unity and of 
likeness stirred in her amidst the bitter pity of her soul. 
To her he was as a king ; and yet he was powerless. 
To give him power she would have died a thousand 
deaths. 

“ The gods gave me life for him,” she thought. “ His 
life instead of mine. Will they forget? — Will they 
forget ?” 

And where she crouched in the gloom beneath the bul- 
rushes she flung herself down prostrate in supplication, 
her face buried in the long damp river-grass. 

“ Oh, Immortals,” she implored, in benighted, wistful, 
passionate faith, “remember to give me his life and take 
mine. Do what you choose with me ; forsake me, kill 
me ; cast my body to fire, and my ashes to the wind ; 
let me be trampled like the dust, and despised as the 
chaff; let me be bruised, beaten, nameless, hated always ; 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


303 


let me always sufifer and always be scorned ; but grant 
me this one thing — to give him his desire I” 

Unless the gods gave him greatness, she knew that 
vain would be the gift of life — the gift of mere length of 
years which she had bought for him. 

Her mind had been left blank as a desert, whilst in its 
solitude dreams had sprung forth windsovvn, like way- 
side grasses, and vague desires wandered like wild doves: 
but although blank, the soil was rich and deep and virgin. 

Because she had dwelt sundered from her kind she 
had learned no evil : a stainless though savage innocence 
had remained with her. She had been reared in hard- 
ship and inured to hunger until such pangs seemed to 
her scarce worth the counting save perhaps to see if 
they had been borne with courage and without murmur. 
On her, profoundly unconscious of the meaning of any 
common luxury or any common comfort, the passions 
of natures, more worldly-wise and better aware of the 
empire of gold, had no hold at any moment. To toil 
dully and be hungry and thirsty, and fatigued and foot- 
sore, had been her daily portion. She knew nothing of 
the innumerable pleasures and powers that the rich com- 
mand. She knew scarcely of the existence of the sim- 
plest forms of civilization ; therefore she knew nothing 
of all that he missed through poverty ; she only perceived, 
by an unerring instinct of appreciation, all that he gained 
through genius. 

Her mind was profoundly ignorant; her character 
trained by cruelty only to endurance: yet the soil was 
aot rank but only untilled, not barren but only unsown ; 
nature had made it generous, though fate had left it un- 
tilled ; it grasped the seed of the first great idea cast to 
it and held it firm, until it multiplied tenfold. 

The imagined danger to them which the peasants had 
believed to exist in her had been as a strong buckler 
between the true danger to her from the defilement of 
their companionship and example. They had cursed 
her as they had passed, and their curses had been her 
blessing. Blinded and imprisoned instincts had always 
moved in her to the great and the good things of which 
no man had taught her in anywise. 


304 


FOLLE-FARINB. 


Left to herself, and uncontaminated by humanity, 
because proscribed by it, she had known no teachers of 
any sort save the winds and the waters, the sun and the 
moon, the daybreak and the night, and these had breathed 
into her an unconscious heroism, a changeless patience, a 
fearless freedom, a strange tenderness and callousness 
united. Ignorant though she was, and abandoned to the 
darkness of all the superstitions and the sullen stupor 
amidst which her lot was cast, there was yet that in her 
which led her to veneration of the purpose of his life. 

He desired not happiness nor tenderness, nor bodily 
ease, nor sensual delight, but only this one thing — a name 
that should not perish from among the memories of men. 

And this desire seemed to her sublime, divine ; not 
comprehending it she yet revered it. She, who had seen 
the souls of the men around her set on a handful of copper 
coin, a fleece of wool, a load of fruit, a petty pilfering, a 
small gain in commerce, saw the greatness of a hero’s 
sacriflce in this supreme self-negation which was willing 
to part with every personal joy and every physical 
pleasure, so that only the works of his hand might live, 
and his thoughts be uttered in them when his body should 
be destroyed. 

It is true that the great artist is as a fallen god who 
remembers a time when worlds arose at his breath, and 
at his bidding the barren lands blossomed into fruitful- 
ness ; the sorcery of the thyrsus is still his, though 
weakened. 

The powers of lost dominions haunt his memory ; the 
remembered glory of an eternal sun is in his eyes, and 
makes the light of common day seem darkness ; the 
heart-sickness of a long exile weighs on him ; incessantly 
he labors to overtake the mirage of a loveliness which 
fades as he pursues it. In the poetic creation by which 
the bondage of his material life is redeemed, he finds at 
once ecstasy and disgust, because he feels at once his 
strength and weakness. For him all things of earth and 
air, and sea and cloud, have beauty ; and to his ear all 
voices of the forest-land and water-world are audible. 

He is as a god, since he can call into palpable shape 
dreams born of impalpable thought; as a god, since he 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


305 


has known the truth digested of lies, and has stood face 
to face with it, and been not afraid ; a god thus. But a 
cripple inasmuch as his hand can never fashion the 
shapes which his vision beholds ; and alien because he 
has lost what he never will find upon earth ; a beast, 
since ever and again his passions will drag him to wallow 
in the filth of sensual indulgence ; a slave, since often- 
times the divinity that is in him breaks and bends under 
the devilry that also is in him, and he obeys the instincts 
of vileness, and when he would fain bless the nations he 
curses them. 

Some vague perception of this dawned on her; the 
sense was in her to feel the beauty of art, and to be 
awed by it though she could not have told what it was, 
nor why she cared for it. And the man who ministered 
to it, who ruled it, and yet obeyed it, seemed to her en- 
nobled with a greatness that was the grandest thing her 
blank and bitter life had known. This was all wonderful, 
dreamful, awful to her, and yet in a half-savage, half- 
poetic way, she comprehended the one object of his life, 
and honored it without doubt or question. 

No day from that time passed by without her spending 
the evening hours under the roof of the haunted corn- 
tower. 

She toiled all the other hours through, from the earliest 
time that the first flush of day lightened the starlit skies; 
did not he toil too ? But when the sun set she claimed 
her freedom ; and her taskmaster did not dare to say her 
nay. 

A new and wondrous and exquisite life was shortly 
opening to her; the life of the imagination. 

All these many years since the last song of Phratos 
had died off her ear, never again to be heard, she had 
spent with no more culture and with no more pleasure 
than the mule had that she led with his load along the 
miry ways in the sharp winter-time. Yet even through 
that utter neglect, and that torpor of thought and feeling, 
some wild natural fancy had been awake in her, some 
vague sense stir that brought to her in the rustle of 
leaves, in the sound of waters, the curling breath of mists, 
the white birth of lilies, in all the notes and hues of the 

26 * 


306 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


open-air world, a mystery and a loveliness that they did 
not bear for any of those around her. 

Now in the words that Arslan cast to her — often as 
idly and indifferently as a man casts bread to frozen birds 
on snow, birds that he pities and yet cares nothing for — the 
old religions, the old beliefs, became to her living truths 
and divine companions. The perplexities of the world 
grew little clearer to her, indeed ; and the miseries of the 
animal creation no less hideous a mystery. The confusion 
of all things was in nowise clearer to her; even, it might 
be, they deepened and grew more entangled. He could 
imbue her with neither credulity nor contentment; for he 
possessed neither, and despised both, as the fool’s para- 
dise of those who, having climbed a sand-hill, fancy that 
they have ascended Zion. 

The weariness, the unrest, the desire, the contempt of 
such a mind as his can furnish anodynes neither to itself 
nor any other. But such possessions and consolations — 
and these are limitless — as the imagination can create, 
he placed within lier reach. Before she had dreamed — 
dreamed all through the heaviness of toil and the gall of 
tyranny ; but she had dreamed as a goatherd may upon 
a mist-swept hill, by the western seas, while all the earth* 
is dark, and only its dim fugitive waking sounds steal 
dully on the drowsy ear. But now, through the myths 
and parables which grew familiar to her ear, she dreamed 
almost as poets dream, bathed in the full flood of a setting 
sun on the wild edge of the Campagna; a light in which 
all common things of daily life grow glorious, and through 
whose rosy hues the only sound that comes is some rich 
dulcet bell that slowly swings in all the majesty and mel- 
ody of prayer. 

The land was no more to her only a hard and cruel 
place of labor and butchery, in which all creatures suffered 
and were slain. All things rose to have their story and 
their symbol for her ; Nature remaining to her that one 
sure solace and immeasurable mystery which she had 
feebly felt it even in her childhood, was brought closer 
to her, and made fuller of compassion. All the forms 
and voices of the fair dead years of the world seemed to 
grow visible and audible to her, with those marvelous 


FOLLE-FARINE. 30t 

tales of the old heroic age which little by little he un- 
folded to her. 

In the people around her, and in their faiths, she had 
no belief; she wanted a faith, and found one in all these 
strange sweet stories of a perished time. 

She had never thought that there had been any other 
generation before that which was present on earth with 
her ; any other existence than this narrow and sordid 
one which encircled her. That men had lived who had 
fashioned those aerial wonders of the tall cathedral spires, 
and stained those vivid hues in its ancient casements, 
had been a fact too remote to be known to her, though for 
twelve years her eyes had gazed at them in reverence of 
their loveliness. 

Through Arsliln the exhaustless annals of the world’s 
history opened before her, the present ceased to matter 
to her in its penury and pain ; for the treasury-houses of 
the golden past were opened to her sight. Most of all 
she loved the myths of the Homeric and Hesiodic ages ; 
and every humble and homely thing became ennobled to 
her and enriched, beholding it through the halo of poetry 
and tradition. 

When aloft in the red and white apple-blossoms two 
sparrows pecked and screamed and spent the pleasant 
summer hours above in the flower-scented air in shrill 
dispute and sharp contention, she thought that she heard 
in all their noisy notes the arrogant voices of Alcyone and 
Cyx. When the wild hyacinths made the ground purple 
beneath the poplars and the pines, she saw in them the 
transformed loveliness of one who had died in the fullness 
of youth, at play in a summer’s noon, and died content 
because stricken by the hand of the greatest and goodliest 
of all gods, the god that loved him best. As the cattle, 
with their sleek red hides and curling horns, came through 
the fogs of the daybreak, across the level meadows, 
and through the deep dock-leaves, they seemed to her no 
more the mere beasts of stall and share, but even as the 
milk-white herds that grazed of yore in the blest pastures 
of Pieria. 

All night, in the heart of the orchards, when the song 
of the nightingales rose on the stillness, it was no longer 


808 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


for her a little brown bird that sang to the bhdding fruit 
and the closed daisies, but was the voice of -^don bewail- 
ing her son through the ages, or the woe of Philomela 
crying through the wilderness. When through the white 
hard brilliancy of noonday the swift swallow darted down 
the beams of light, she saw no longer in it an insect-hun- 
ter, a house-nesting creature, but saw the shape of Procne, 
slaughter-haunted, seeking rest and finding none. And 
when she went about her labors, hewing wood, drawing 
water, bearing the corn to the grindstones, leading the 
mules to the mill-stream, she ceased to despair. For she 
bad heard the old glad story of the children of Zeus who 
dwelt so long within a herdsman’s hut, nameless and dis- 
honored, yet lived to go back crowned to Thebes and see 
the beasts of the desert and the stones of the streets rise 
up and obey the magic of their song. 

Arslan in his day had given many evil gifts, but this 
one gift that he gave was pure and full of solace: this 
gift of the beauty of the past. Imperfect, obscure, broken 
in fragments, obscured by her own ignorance, it was 
indeed when it reached her; yet it came with a glory 
that time could not dim, and a consolation that ignorance 
could not impair. 


CHAPTER YI. 

“What has come to that evil one? She walks the 
land as though she were a queen,” the people of Yprfes 
said to one another, watching the creature they abhorred 
as she went through the town to the river-stair or to the 
market-stall. 

She seemed to them transfigured. 

A perpetual radiance shone in the dark depths of her 
eyes ; a proud elasticity replaced the old sullen defiance 
of her carriage : her face had a sweet musing mystery 
and dreaminess on it; and when she smiled her smile 
was soft, and sudden, like the smile of one who bears fair 
tidings in her heart unspoken. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


309 


Even those people, dull and plodding and taciturn, ab- 
sorbed in their small trades or in their continual field 
labor, were struck by the change in her, and looked after 
her, and listened in a stupid wonder to the sonorous songs 
in an unknown tongue that rose so often on her lips as 
she strode among the summer grasses or led the laden 
mules through the fords. 

They saw, even with their eyes purblind from hate, 
that she had thrown off their yoke, and had escaped from 
their narrow world, and was happy with some rich, mute, 
nameless happiness that they could neither evade nor 
understand. 

The fall of evening always brought her to him ; he let 
her come, finding a certain charm in that savage temper 
which grew so tame to him, in that fierce courage which 
to him was so humble, in that absolute ignorance which 
was yet so curiously blended with so strong a power of 
fancy and so quick an instinct of beauty. But he let her 
go again with indifference, and never tried by any word 
to keep her an hour later than she chose to stay. She 
was to him like some handsome dangerous beast that 
flew at all others and crouched to him. He had a certain 
pleasure in her color and her grace ; in making her great 
eyes glow, and seeing the light of awakening intelligence 
break over all her beautiful, clouded, fierce face. 

As she learned, too, to hear more often the sound of 
her own voice, and to use a more varied and copious lan- 
guage, a rude eloquence came naturally to her ; and when 
her silence was broken it was usually for some terse, 
vivid, picturesque utterance which had an artistic interest 
for him. In this simple and monotonous province, with its 
tedious sameness of life and its green arable country that 
tired the sight fed in youth on the grandeur of cloud-reach- 
ing mountains and the tumults of ice-tossing seas, this 
creature, so utterly unlike her kind, so golden with the glow 
of tawny desert suns, and so strong with the liberty and 
the ferocity and the dormant passion and the silent force 
of some free forest animal, was in a way welcome. 

All things too were so new and strange to her; all 
common knowledge was so utterly unknown to her; all 
other kinds of life were so unintelligible to her; and yet 


310 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


with all her ignorance she had so swift a fancy, so keen 
an irony, so poetic an instinct, that it seemed to him 
when he spoke with her that he talked with some creat- 
ure from another planet than his own. 

He liked to make her smile; he liked to make her 
suffer ; he liked to inflame, to wound, to charm, to tame 
her ; he liked all these without passion, rather with curi- 
osity than with interest, much as he had liked in the 
season of his boyhood to ruffle the plumage of a captured 
sea-bird ; to see its eye sparkle, and then grow dull and 
flash again with pain, and then at the last turn soft with 
weary, wistful tenderness, having been taught at once 
the misery of bondage and the tyranny of a human love. 

She was a bronzed, bare-footed, fleet-limbed young 
outcast, he told himself, with the scowl of an habitual 
defiance on her straight brows, and the curl of an un- 
tamable scorn upon her rich red lips, and a curious 
sovereignty and savageness in her dauntless carriage ; 
and yet there was a certain nobility and melancholy in 
her that made her seem like one of a great and fallen 
race ; and in her eyes there was a look repellant yet ap- 
pealing, and lustrous with sleeping passion, that tempted 
him to wake what slumbered there. 

But in these early springtide days he suffered her to 
come and go as she listed, without either persuasion or 
forbiddance on his own part. 

The impassioned reverence which she had for the 
things he had created was only the untutored, unreason- 
ing reverence of the barbarian or of the peasant ; but it 
had a sweetness for him. 

He had been alone so long ; and so long had passed 
since any cheek had flushed and any breast had heaved 
under the influence of any one of those strange fancies and 
noble stories which he had pictured on the walls of his 
lonely chamber. He had despaired of and despised 
himself ; despised his continual failure, had despaired of 
all power to sway the souls and gain the eyes of his 
fellow-men. It was a little thing— a thing so little that 
he called himself a fool for taking any count of it; yet, 
the hot tears that dimmed the sight of this young barba- 
rian who was herself of no more value than the mill-dust 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


311 


that drifted on the breeze, the soft vague breathless awe 
that stole upon her as she gazed at the colorless shadows 
in which his genius had spent itself, — these were sweet to 
him with a sweetness that made him ashamed of his own 
weakness. 

She had given the breath of life back to his body by 
an act of which he was ignorant ; and now she gave back 
the breath of hope to his mind by a worship which he 
contemned even whilst he was glad of it. 

Meanwhile the foul tongues of her enemies rang with 
loud glee over this new shame which they could cast at 
her. 

“ She has found a lover, — oh-ho I — that brown wicked 
thing I A lover meet for her ; — a man who walks abroad 
in the moonless nights, and plucks the mandrake, and 
worships the devil, and paints people in their own like- 
ness, so that as the color dries the life wastes !” — so the 
women screamed after her often as she went ; she nothing 
understanding or heeding, but lost in the dreams of her 
own waking imagination. 

At times such words as these reached Claudis Flamma, 
but he turned a deaf ear to them : he had the wisdom of 
the world in him, though he was only an old miller who 
had never stirred ten leagues from his home; and whilst 
the devil served him well, he quarreled not with the 
devil. 

In a grim way, it was a pleasure to him to think that 
the thing he hated might be accursed body and soul : he 
had never cared either for her body or her soul ; so that 
the first worked for him, the last might destroy itself in 
its own darkness : — he had never stretched a finger to 
hold it back. 

The pride and the honesty and the rude candor and 
instinctive purity of this young life of hers had been a 
perpetual hinderance and canker to him ; begotten of evil, 
by all the law^s of justice, in evil she should live and die. 
So Flamma reasoned ; and to the sayings of bis country- 
side he gave a stony ear and a stony glance. She never 
once, after the first day, breathed a word to Arslan of 
the treatment that she received at Ypres. It was not in 
her nature to complain ; and she abhorred even his pity. 


312 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


Whatever she endured, she kept silence on it; when he 
asked her how her grandsire dealt with her, she always 
answered him, “It is well enough with me now.” He 
cared not enough for her to doubt her. 

And, in a manner, she had learned how to keep her 
tyrant at bay. He did not dare to lay hands on her now 
that her eyes had got that new fire, and her voice that 
stern serene contempt. His wolf cub had shown her 
teeth at last, at the lash, and he did not venture to sting 
her to revolt with too long use of scourge and chain. 

So she obtained more leisure ; and what she did not 
spend in Arslan’s tower she spent in acquiring another 
art, — she learned to read. 

There was an old herb-seller in the market-place who 
was not so harsh to her as the others were, but who had 
now and then for her a rough kindly word out of gentleness 
to the memory of Reine Flamma. This woman was 
better educated than most, and could even write a little. 

To her Folle-Farine went. 

“ See here,” she said, “you are feeble, and I am strong. 
I know every nook and corner in the woods. I know a 
hundred rare herbs that j'ou never find. I will bring 
you a basketful^of them ■ >'•0 in each week if you will 
show me how to read i iose signs that the people call 
letters.” 

The old woman hesitated. “ It w^ere as much as my 
life is worth to have you seen with me. The lads will 

stone my window. Still ” The wish for the rare 

herbs, and the remembrance of the fatigue that would be 
spared to her rheumatic body by compliance, prevailed 
over her fears. She consented. 

Three times a week Folle-Farine rose while it was 
still dark, and scoured the wooded lauds and the moss- 
green orchards and the little brooks in the meadows in 
search of every herb that grew. She knew those green 
places which had been her only kingdom and her only 
solace as no one else knew them ; and the old dame’s 
herb-stall was the envy and despair of all the market- 
place. 

Now and then a laborer earlier than the rest, or a 
vagrant sleeping under a hedge-row, saw her going 


FOLLE-FARINE, 


313 


through the darkness with her green bundle on her head, 
or stooping among the watercourses ankle-deep in rushes, 
and he crossed himself and went and told how he had 
seen the Evil Spirit of Ypres gathering tlie poison-weeds 
that made ships founder, and strong men droop and die, 
and women love unnatural and horrible things, and all 
manner of woe and sickness overtake those she hated. 

Often, too, at this lonely time, before the day broke, 
she met Arslan. 

Jt was his habit to be abroad when others slept: 
studies of the night and its peculiar loveliness entered 
largely into many of his paintings ; the beauty of water 
rippling in the moonbeam, of gray reeds blowing against 
the first faint red of dawn, of dark fields with sleeping 
cattle and folded sheep, of dreamy pools made visible 
by the shine of their folded white lilies, — these were all 
things he cared to study. 

The earth has always most charm, and least pain, to 
the poet or the artist when men are hidden away under 
their roofs. They do not then break its calm with either 
their mirth or their brutality, the vile and revolting coarse- 
ness of their works, only built to blot it with so much de- 
formity, is softened and obscured in the purple breadths 
of shadow and the dim tender gleam of stars ; and it was 
thus that Arslan loved best to move abroad. 

Sometimes the shepherd going to his flocks, or the 
housewife opening her shutter in the wayside cabin, or 
the huckster driving early his mule seawards to meet 
the fish that the night-trawlers had brought, saw them 
together thus, and talked of it ; and said that these two, 
accursed of all honest folk, were after some unholy work 
— coming from the orgy of some witches’ sabbath, or 
seeking some devil’s root that would give them the treas- 
ured gold of misers’ tombs or the power of life and death. 

For these things are still believed by many a peasant’s 
hearth, and whispered darkly as night closes in and the 
wind rises. 

Wading in the shallow streams, with the breeze toss- 
ing her hair, and the dew bright on her sheaf of herbs, 
Folle-Farine paid thus the only wages she could for learn- 
ing the art of letters 


27 


314 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


The acquisition was hard and hateful — a dull plodding 
task that she detested ; and her teacher was old, and ig- 
norant of all the grace and the lore of books. She could 
only learn too at odd snatches of time, with the cabin- 
window barred up and the light shut out, for the old 
peasant was fearful of gaining a bad name among her 
neighbors if she were seen in communion with the wicked 
thing of Ypres. 

Still she, the child, persevered, and before long pos- 
sessed herself of the rudiments of letters, though she had 
only one primer to learn from that belonged to the herb- 
seller — a rude old tattered pamphlet recounting the life 
and death of Catherine of Siena. Jt was not that she 
had cared to read, for reading’s sake : books, she heard, 
only told the thoughts and the creeds of the human race, 
and she cared nothing to know these ; but one day he 
had said to her, half unconsciously, “ If only you were 
not so ignorant !” — and since that day she had set her- 
self to clear away her ignorance little by little, as she 
would have cleared brushwood with her hatchet. 

It was the sweetest hour she had ever known when 
she was able to stand before him and say, “ The charac- 
ters that men print are no longer riddles to me.” 

He praised her ; and she was glad and proud. 

It was love that had entered into her, but a great and 
noble love, full of intense humility, of supreme self-sacri- 
fice ; — a love that unconsciously led her to chasten into 
gentleness the fierce soul in her, and to try and seek light 
for the darkness of her mind. 

He saw the influence he had on her, but he was care- 
less of it. 

A gipsy-child working for bread at a little mill-house 
in these Norman woods, — what use would be to her 
beauty of thought, grace of fancy, the desire begotten of 
knowledge, the poetry learned from the past? Still he 
gave her these; partly because he pitied her, partly be- 
cause in his exhaustion and solitude this creature, in her 
beauty and her submission, was welcome to him. 

And yet he thought so little of her, and chiefly, when 
he thought of her, chose to perplex her or to wound her, 
that he might see her eyes dilate in wondering amaze, or 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


315 


her face quiver and flush, and then grow dark, with the 
torment of a mute and subdued pain. 

She was a study to him, as was the scarlet rose in the 
garden-ways, or the purple-breasted pigeon in the woods ; 
he dealt with her as he would have dealt with the flower 
or the bird if he had wished to study them more nearly, 
by tearing the rose open at its core, or casting a stone at 
the blue-rock on the wing. 

This was not cruelty in him ; it was only habit — 
habit, and the callousness begotten by his own continual 
pain. 

The pain as of a knife forever thrust into the loins, of 
a cord forever knotted hard about the temples, which is 
the daily and nightly peiialt}^ of those mad enough to 
believe that they have the force in them to change the 
sluggard appetites and the hungry cruelties of their kind 
into a life of high endeavor and divine desire. 

He held that a man’s chief passion is his destiny, and 
will shape his fate, rough-hew his fate as circumstance or 
as hazard may. 

His chief, his sole, passion was a great ambition — a 
passion pure as crystal, since the eminence he craved 
was for his creations, not for his name. Yet it had failed 
to compel the destiny that he had believed to be his own : 
and yet every hour he seemed to sink lower and lower 
into oblivion, further and further from the possibility of 
any fulfillment of his dreams ; and the wasted years of his 
life fell away one by one into the gulf of the past, vain, 
unheard, unfruitful, as the frozen words on the deck of 
the ship of Pantagruel. 

“ What is the use?” he muttered, half aloud, one day. 
before his paintings. “ What is the use ? If I die to- 
morrow they will sell for so much rubbish to heat a 
bakery store. It is only a mad waste of hours — waste 
of color, of canvas, of labor. The world has told me so 
many years. The world always knows what it wants. 
It selects unerringly. It must know better than I do. 
■’JMie man is a fool, indeed, who presumes to be wiser 
than all his generation. If the world will have nothing 
to do with you, go and hang yourself — or if you fear to 
do that, dig a ditch as a grave for a daily meal. Give 


316 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


over dreams. The world knows what it wants, and if it 
wanted you would take you. It has brazen lungs to shout 
for what it needs ; the lungs of a multitude. It is no use 
what your own voice whispers you unless those great 
lungs also shout before you, Hosaunah.’’ 

So he spoke to himself in bitterness of soul, standing 
before his cartoons into which he had thrown all the 
genius there was in him, and which hung there unseen 
save by the spider that wove and the moth that flew over 
them. 

Folle-Farine, who was that day in his chamber, looked 
at him with the wistful, far-reaching comprehension which 
an unerring instinct taught her. 

“ Of a winter night,’’ she said, slowly, “I have heard 
old Pitchou read aloud to Flamma, and she read of their 
God, the one they hang everywhere on the crosses here ; 
and the story was that the populace scourged and nailed 
to death the one whom they knew afterwards, when too 
late, to have been the great man they looked for, and 
that then being bidden to make their choice of one to 
save, they choose to ransom and honor a thief: one 
called Barabbas. Is it true ? — if the world’s choice were 
wrong once, why not twice?” 

Arslan smiled ; the smile she knew so well, and which 
had no more warmth than the ice floes of his native seas. 

“ Why not twice? Why not a thousand times? A 
thief has the world’s sympathies always. It is always 
the Barabbas — the trickster in talent, the forger of stolen 
wisdom, the bravo of political crime, the huckster of 
plundered thoughts, the charlatan of false art, whom the 
vox populi elects and sets free, and sends on his way 
lejoicing. ‘Will ye have Christ or Barabbas?’ Every 
generation is asked the same question, and every genera- 
tion gives the same answer; and scourges the divinity 
out of its midst, and finds its idol in brute force and low 
greed.” 

She only dimly comprehended, not well knowing why 
her words had thus roused him. She pondered awhile, 
then her face cleared. 

“ But the end ?” she asked. “ The dead God is the 
God of all these people round us now, and they have 


• FOLLE-FARINE. 


31T 


built great places in his honor, and they bow when they 
pass his likeness in the highway or the market-place. 
But with Barabbas — what was the end ? It seems that 
they loathe and despise him 

Arslan laughed a little. 

“ His end ? In Syria maybe the vultures picked his 
bones, where they lay whitening on the plains — those 
times were primitive, the world was young. But in our 
day Barabbas lives and dies in honor, and has a tomb 
that stares all men in the face, setting forth his virtues, 
so that all who run may read. In our day Barabbas — 
the -Barabbas of money greeds and delicate cunning, and 
the theft, which has risen to science, and the assassination 
that destroys souls and not bodies, and the crime that 
deals moral death and not material death — our Barabbas, 
who is crowned Fraud in the place of mailed Force, 
— lives always in purple and fine linen, and ends in the 
odor of sanctity with the prayers of priests over his 
corpse.’’ 

He spoke with a certain fierce passion that rose in him 
whenever he thought of that world which had rejected 
hin), and had accepted so many others, weaker in brain 
and nerve, but stronger in one sense, because more dis- 
honest; and as he spoke he went straight to a wall on 
his right, where a great sea of gray paper was stretched, 
untouched and ready to his hand. 

She would have spoken, but he made a motion to 
silence. 

“ Hush I be quiet,” he said to her, almost harshly. 
“ I have thought of something.” 

And he took the charcoal and swept rapidly with it 
over the dull blank surface till the vacancy glowed with 
life. A thought had kindled in him ; a vision had arisen 
before him. 

The scene around him vanished utterly from his sight. 
The gray stone walls, the square windows through which 
the fading sunrays fell; the level pastures and sullen 
streams, and pallid skies without, all faded away as 
though they had existed only in a dream. 

All the empty space about him became peopled with 
2t* 


318 


FOLLE-FARINE. . 


many human shapes that for him had breath and being, 
though no other eye could have beheld them. 

The old Syrian world of eighteen hundred years before 
arose and glowed before him. The things of his own life 
died away, and in their stead he saw the fierce flame of 
Eastern suns, the gleaming range of marble palaces, the 
purple flash of pomegranate flowers, the deep color of 
Oriental robes, the soft silver of hills olive-crested, the 
tumult of a city at high festival. 

And he could not rest until all he thus saw in his vision 
he had rendered as far as his hand could render it; and 
what he drew was this. 

A great thirsty, heated, seething crowd ; a crowd that 
had manhood and womanhood, age and infancy, youths 
and maidens within its ranks; a crowd in whose faces 
every animal lust and every human passion were let 
loose ; a crowd on which a noonday sun without shadow 
streamed ; a sun which parched and festered and engen- 
dered all corruption in the land on which it looked. This 
crowd was in a city, a city on whose flat roofs the myrtle 
and the cystus bloomed ; above whose gleaming marble 
walls the silver plumes of olives waved; upon whose 
distant slopes the darkling cedar groves rose straight 
against the sky, and on whose lofty temple plates of gold 
glistened against the shining heavens. This crowd had 
scourges, and stones, and goads in their hands; and in 
their midst they had one clothed in white, whose head 
was thorn-crowned, and whose eyes were filled with a 
god’s pity and a man’s reproach ; and him they stoned, 
and lashed, and hooted. 

And triumphant in the throng, whose choice he was, 
seated aloft upon men’s shoulders, with a purple robe 
thrown on his shoulders, there sat a brawny, grinning, 
bloated, jibbering thing, with curled lips and savage eyes, 
and satyr’s leer; the creature of greed of lust, of "ob- 
scenity, of brutality, of avarice, of desire. This man 
the people followed, rejoicing exceedingly, content in the 
guide whom they had cho.sen, victorious in the fiend for 
whom they spurned a deity; crying, with wide-open 
throats and brazen lungs, — “Barabbas!” 

There was not a form in all this closed-packed throng 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


319 


which had not a terrible irony in it, which was not in 
itself a symbol of some lust or of some vice, for which 
women and men abjure the godhead in them. 

One gorged drunkard lay asleep with his amphora 
broken beneath him, the stream of the purple wine lapped 
eagerly by ragged children. 

A money-changer had left the receipt of custom, eager 
to watch and shout, and a thief clutched both hands full 
of the forsaken coins and fled. 

A miser had dropped a bag of gold, and stopped to 
catch at all the rolling pieces, regardless in his greed how 
the crowd trampled and trod on him. 

A mother chid and struck her little brown curly child, 
because be stretched his arms and turned his face towards 
the thorn-crowned captive. 

A priest of the temple, with a blood-stained knife 
thrust in his girdle, dragged beside him, by the throat, a 
little tender lamb doomed for the sacrifice. 

A dancing-woman with jewels in her ears, and half 
naked to the waist, sounding the brazen cymbals above 
her head, drew a score of youths after her in Barabbas’ 
train. 

On one of the flat roof-tops, reclining on purple and 
fine linen, looking down on the street below from the 
thick foliage of her citron boughs and her red Syrian 
roses, was an Egyptian wanton ; and leaning beside her, 
tossing golden apples into her bosom, was a young centu- 
rion of the Roman guard, languid atid laughing, with his 
fair chest bare to the heat, and his armor flung in a pile 
beside him. 

And thus, in like manner, every figure bore its parable; 
whilst above all was the hard, hot, cruel, cloudless sky 
of blue, without one faintest mist to break its horrible 
serenity, and, high in the azure ether and against the sun, 
an eagle and a vulture fought, locked close, and tearing 
at each other’s breasts. 

Six nights the conception occupied him — his days were 
not his own, he spent them in a rough mechanical labor 
which his strength executed while his mind was far away 
from it; but the nights were all his, and at the end of the 


320 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


could perfect it ; begotten by a chance and ignorant word 
as have been many of the greatest works the world has 

seen ; oaks sprung from the acorn that a careless child 

has let fall. 

When he had finished it, his arm dropped to his side, 
he stood motionless ; the red glow of the dawn lighting 
the dreamy depths of his sleepless eyes. 

He knew that his work was good. 

The artist, for one moment of ecstasy, realizes the con- 
tent of a god when, resting from his labors, he knows 
that those labors have borne their full fruit. 

It is only for a moment ; the greater the artist the more 
swiftly will discontent and misgiving overtake him, the 
more quickly will the feebleness of his execution disgust 
him in comparison with the splendor of his ideal ; the 
more surely will he — though the world ring with ap- 
plause of him — be enraged and derisive and impatient at 
himself. 

But while the moment lasts it is a rapture ; keen, pure, 
intense, surpassing every other. In it, fleeting though it 
be, he is blessed with a blessing that never falls on any 
other creature. The work of his brain and of his hand 
contents him, — it is the purest joy on earth. 

Arslkn knew that joy as he looked on the vast imagi- 
nation for which he had given up sleep, and absorbed in 
which he had almost forgotten hunger and thirst and the 
passage of time. 

He had known no rest until he had embodied the shapes 
that pursued him. He had scarcely spoken, barely slum- 
bered an hour ; tired out, consumed with restless fever, 
weak from want of sleep and neglect of food he had 
worked on, and on, and on, until the vision as he had 
beheld it lived there, recorded for the world that denied 
him. 

As he looked on it he felt his own strength, and was 
glad ; he had faith in himself though he had faith in no 
other thing ; he ceased to care what other fate befell him, 
so that only this supreme power of creation remained 
with him. 

His lamp died out ; the bell of a distant clock chimed 
the fourth hour of the passing night. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


321 


The day broke in the east, beyond the gray levels of 
the fields and plains ; the dusky crimson of the dawn rose 
over the cool dark skies j the light of the morning stars 
came in and touched the visage of his fettered Christ; all 
the rest was in shadow. 

He himself remained motionless before it. He knew 
that in it lay the best achievement, the highest utterance, 
the truest parable, that the genius in him had ever con- 
ceived and put forth ; — and he knew too that he was as 
powerless to raise it to the public sight of men as though 
he were stretched dead beneath it. He knew that there 
would be none to heed whether it rotted there in the 
dust, or perished by moth or by flame, unless indeed some 
illness should befall him, and it should be taken with the 
rest to satisfy some petty debt of bread, or oil, or fuel. 

There, on that wall, he had written, with all the might 
there was in him, his warning to the age in which he 
lived, his message to future generations, his claims to 
men’s remembrance after death : and there were none to 
see, none to read, none to believe. Great things, beauti- 
ful things, things of wisdom, things of grace, things ter- 
rible in their scorn and divine in their majesty, rose up 
about him, incarnated by his mind and his hand — and 
their doom was to fade and wither without leaving one 
human mind the richer for their story, one human soul 
the nobler for their meaning. 

To the humanity around him they had no value save 
such value of a few coins as might lie in them to liquidate 
some miserable scare at the bakehouse or the oilshop in 
the streets of the town. 

A year of labor, and the cartoon could be transferred 
to the permanent life of the canvas ; and he was a master 
of color, and loved to wrestle with its intricacies as the 
mariner struggles with the storm. 

“ But what were the use ?” he pondered as he stood 
there. “ What the use to be at pains to give it its full 
life on canvas? No man will ever look on it.” 

All labors of his art were dear to him, and none weari- 
some : yet he doubted what it would avail to commence 
the perpetuation of this work on canvas. 

If the world were never to know that it existed, it 


322 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


would be as well to leave it there on its gray sea of 
paper, to be moved to and fro with each wind that blew 
tlirough the broken rafters, and to be brushed by the 
wing of the owl and the flittermouse. 

The door softly unclosed ; he did not hear it. 

Across the chamber Folle-Farine stole noiselessly 

She had come and gone thus a score of times through 
those six nights of his vigil ; and he had seldom seen her, 
never spoken to her ; now and then she had touched him, 
and placed before him some simple meal of herbs and 
bread, and he had taken it half unconsciously, and drunk 
great draughts of water, and turned back again to his 
work, not noticing that she had brought to him what 
he sorely needed, and yet would not of himself have re- 
membered. 

She came to him without haste and without sound, 
and stood before him and looked ; — looked with all her 
soul in her awed eyes. 

The dawn was brighter now, red and hazy with curious 
faint gleams of radiance from the sun, that as yet was not 
risen. All the light there was fell on the crowd of Jeru- 
salem, 

One ray white and pure fell upon the bowed head of 
the bound God. 

She stood and gazed at it. 

She had watched it all grow gradually into being from 
out the chaos of dull spaces and confused lines. This 
art, which could call life from the dry wastes of wood 
and paper, and shed perpetual light where all was dark- 
ness, was even to her an alchemy incomprehensible, im- 
measurable ; a thing not to be criticised or questioned, 
but adored in all its unscrutable and majestic majesty. 
To her it could not have been more marvelous if his 
hand had changed the river-sand to gold, or his touch 
wakened the dead cornflowers to bloom afresh as living 
asphodels. But now for once she forgot the sorcery of 
the art in the terror and the pathos of the story that 
it told; now for once she forgot, in the creation, its 
creator. 

All she saw was the face of the Christ, — the pale bent 
face, in whose eyes three was a patience so perfect, a pity 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


323 


so infinite, a reproach that had no wrath, a scorn that had 
no cruelty. 

She had hated the Christ on the cross, because he was 
the God of the people she hated, and in whose name 
they reviled her. But this Christ moved her strangely — 
there, in the light, alone ; betrayed and forsaken while 
the crowd rushed on, lauding Barabbas, 

Ignorant though she was, the profound meanings of 
the parable penetrated her with their ironies and with 
their woe — the parable of the genius rejected and the 
thief exalted. 

She trembled and was silent ; and in her eyes sudden 
tears swam. 

•* They have talked of their God — often — so often, she 
muttered. “ But I never knew till now what they meant. 

Arslan turned and looked at her. He had not known 
that she was there. 

“Is it so?” he said, slowly. “Well — the world 
refuses me fame ; but I do not know that the world could 
give me a higher tribute than your admiration.” 

“ The world?” she echoed, with her eyes still fastened 
on the head of the Christ and the multitudes that flocked 
after Barabbas “The world? You care for the world 
— you ? — who have painted that ?” 

Arslan did not answer her : he felt the rebuke. 

He had drawn the picture in all its deadly irony, in all 
its pitiless truth, only himself to desire and strive for the 
wine streams and the painted harlotry, and the showers 
of gold, and the false gods of a worldly success. 

Was he a renegade to his own religion ; a skeptic of 
his own teaching? 

It was not for the first time that the dreamy utterances 
of this untrained and imperfect intelligence had struck 
home to the imperious and mature intellect of the man 
of genius. 

He flung his charcoal away, and looked at the sun as 
it rose. 

“ Even I !” he answered her. “ We, who call ourselves 
poets or painters, can see the truth and can tell it, — we 
are prophets so far, — but when we come down from our 
Horeb we hanker for the flesh-pots and the dancing- 


324 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


women, and the bags of gold, like all the rest. We are 
no better than those we preach to; perhaps we are worse. 
Our eyes are set to the light ; but our feet are fixed in the 
mire.” 

She did not hear him ; and had she heard, would not 
have comprehended. 

Her eyes were still fastened on the Christ, and the 
blood in her cheeks faded and glowed at every breath she 
drew, and in her eye there was the wistful, wondering, 
trustful reverence which shone in those of the‘child, who, 
breaking from his mother’s arms, and, regardless of the 
soldier’s stripes, clung to the feet of the scourged captive, 
and there kneeled and prayed. 

Without looking at her, Arslan went out to his daily 
labor on the waters. 

The sun had fully risen ; the day was red and clear ; 
the earth was hushed in perfect stillness ; the only sounds 
there were came from the wings and voices of innumer- 
able birds. 

“And yet I desire nothing for myself,” he thought. 
“I would lie down and die to-morrow, gladly^ did I 
know that they would live.” 

Yet he knew that to desire a fame after death, was as 
idle as to desire with a child’s desire, the stars. 

For the earth is crowded full with clay gods and false 
prophets, and fresh legions forever arriving to carry ou 
the old strife for supremacy ; and if a man pass unknown 
all the titne that his voice is audible, and his hand visible, 
through the sound and smoke of the battle, he will dream 
in vain of any remembrance when the gates of the grave 
shall have closed on him and shut him forever from sight. 

When the world was in its youth, it had leisure to 
garner its recollections ; even to pause and look back, 
and to see what flower of a fair thought, what fruit of a 
noble art, it might have overlooked or left down-trodden. 

But now it is so old, and is so tired ; it is purblind and 
heavy of foot; it does not notice what it destroys; it 
desires rest, and can find none ; nothing can matter 
greatly to it; its dead are so many that it cannot count 
them ; and being thus worn and dulled with age, and 
suffocated under the weight of its innumerable memories, 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


325 


it is very slow to be moved, and swift — terribly swift — 
to forget. 

Why should it not be ? 

It has known the best, it has known the worst, that 
ever', can befall it. 

Apd the prayer which to the heart of a man seems so 
freshly born from his own desire, what is it on the weary 
ear ctf the world, save the same old old cry that it has 

sound of the 



heard^ through all the ages, empty as 
wind,\^and forever — forever unanswered 1 


CHAPTER yil. 

One day, while the year was still young, though the 
first thunder-heats of the .early summer had come, he 
asked her to go with him to the sea ere the sun set. 

“ The sea ?’’ she repeated. “ What is that V 

“Is it possible that you do not know?” he asked, in 
utter wonder. “ You who have lived all these years 
within two leagues of it!” 

“ 1 have heard often of it,” she said, simply ; “but I 
cannot tell what it is.” 

“ The man has never yet lived who could tell — in fit 
language. Poseidon is the only one of all the old gods 
of Hellas who still lives and reigns. We will go to his 
kingdom. Sight is better than speech.” 

So he took her along the^slow course of the inland 
water through the osiers and the willows, down to where 
the slow river ripples would meet the swift salt waves. 

It was true what she had said, that she had never seen 
the sea. Her errands had always been to and fro be- 
tween the mill and the quay in the town, no farther ; she 
had exchanged so little communion with the people of 
the district that she knew nothing of whither the barges 
went that took away the corn and fruit, nor whence the 
big boats came that brought the coals and fish ; when 
she had a little space of leisure to herself she had wan- 

28 


326 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


dered indeed, but never so far as the shore ; almost always 
in the woods and the meadows; never where the river, 
widening as it ran, spread out between level banks until, 
touching tlie sea, it became a broad estuary. 

“She had heard speak of the sea, indeed, as of some 
great highway on which men traveled incessantly to and 
fro; as of something unintelligible, remote, belonging to 
others, indifferent and alien to herself. 

When she had thought of it at all, she had only thought 
of it as probably some wide canal black with mud and 
dust and edged by dull pathways slippery and toilsome, 
along which tired horses towed heavy burdens all day 
long, that men and women might be thereby enriched of 
the beauty and the mystery. Of the infinite sweetness 
and solace of the sea, she knew no more than she knew 
of any loveliness or of any pity in human nature. 

A few leagues off, where the stream widened into a bay 
and was hemmed in by sand-banks in lieu of its flat green 
l)astures, there was a little fishing-town, built under the 
great curve of beetling cliffs, and busy with all the stir 
and noise of mart and wharf. There the sea was crowded 
with many masts and ruddy with red-brown canvas ; and 
the air was full of the salt scent of rotting sea-weed, of 
stiff sails spread out to dry, of great shoals of fish poured 
out upon the beach, and of dusky noisome cabins, foul 
smelling and made hideous by fishwives’ oaths, and the 
death-screams of scalded shellfish. 

He did not take her thither. 

He took her half way dowm the stream whilst it was 
still sleepily beautiful with j)ale gray willows and green 
meadow-land, and acres of silvery reeds, and here and 
there some quaint old steeple or some apple-hidden roofs 
on either side its banks. But midway he left the water 
and stretched out across the countiy, she beside him, 
moving with that rapid, lithe, and staglike ease of limbs 
that have never known restraint. 

Some few people passed them on their way : a child, 
taking the cliff-road to his home under the rocks, with a 
big blue pitcher in his hands; an old man, who had a 
fishing-brig at sea and toiled up there to look for her, 
with a gray dog at his heels, and the smell of salt water 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


327 


in his clothes; a goatherd, clad in rough skins, wool out- 
ward, and killing birds with stones as he went ; a woman, 
with a blue skirt and scarlet hose, and a bundle of boughs 
and brambles on her head, with here and there a stray 
winter berry glowing red through the tender green leaf- 
age ; all these looked askance at them, and the goatherd 
muttered a curse, and the woman a prayer, and gave 
them wide way through the stunted furze, for they were 
both of them accursed in the people’s sight. 

“You find it hard to live apart from your kind?” he 
asked her suddenly as they gained the fields where no 
human habitation at all was left, and over which in the 
radiance of the still sunlit skies there hung the pale 
crescent of a week-old moon. 

“ To live apart ?” — she did not understand. 

“Yes — like this. To have no chijd smile, no woman 
gossip, no man exchange good-morrow with you. Is it 
any sorrow to you ?” 

Her eyes flashed through the darkness fiercely. 

“What does it matter? It is best so. One is free. 
One owes nothing — not so much as a fair word. That is 
well.” 

“ I think it is well — if one is strong enough for it. It 
wants strength.” 

“ I am strong.” 

She spoke quietly, with the firm and simple conscious- 
ness of force, which has as little of vanity in it as it has 
of weakness. 

“ To live apart,” she said, after a pause, in which he 
had not answered. “I know what you mean — now. It 
is well — it was well with those men you tell me of, when 
the world was young, who left all other men and went to 
live with the watercourse and the wild dove, and the 
rose and the palm, and the great yellow desert; was it 
not well ?” 

“ So well with them that men worshiped them for it. 
But there is no such worship now. The cities are the 
kingdom of heaven, not the deserts; and he who hankers 
for the wilderness is stoned in the streets as a fool. And 
how should it be well with you, who have neither wild 


328 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


rose nor wild dove for compensation, but are only beaten 
and hooted, and hated and despised 

Her eyes "“littered through the darkness, and her voice 
was hard and fierce as she answered him : 

“ See here. — There is a pretty golden thing in the west 
road of the town who fears me horribly, Yvonne, the 
pottery painter’s daughter. She says to her father at 
evening, ‘ 1 must go read the offices to old Mother Margot 
and he says, ‘Go, my daughter; piety and reverence of 
age are twin blossoms on one stem of a tree that grows 
at the right hand of God in Paradise.* 

“And she goes ; not to Margot, but to a little booth 
where there is dancing, and singing, and brawling, that 
her father has forbade her to go near by a league. 

“There is an old man at. the corner of the market- 
place, Ryno, the fruitseller, who says that I am accursed, 
and spits out at me as I pass. He says to the people as 
they go by his stall, ‘ See these peaches, they are smooth 
and rosy as a child’s cheek ; sweet and firm ; not their 
like betwixt this and Paris. I will let you have them 
cheap, so cheap ; I need sorely to send money to my sick 
son in Africa.’ And the people pay, greedily ; and when 
the peaches are home the.y see a little black speck in each 
of them, and all save their bloom is rottenness. 

“ There is a woman who makes lace at the window of 
the house against the fourth gate; Marion Silvis; she is 
white and sleek, and blue-eyed ; the priests honor her, 
and she never misses a mass. She has an old blind 
mother whom she leaves in her room. She goes out 
softly at nightfall, and she slips to a wineshop full of 
soldiers, and her lovers kiss her on the mouth. And the 
old mother sits moaning and hungry at home ; and a 
night ago she was badly burned, being alone. Now — is 
it well or no to be hated of those people ? If I had 
loved them, and they me, I might have become a liar, and 
have thieved, and have let men kiss me, likewise.” 

She spoke with thoughtful and fierce earnestness, not 
witting of the caustic in her own words, meaning simply 
what she said, and classing the kisses of men as some 
sort of weakness and vileness, like those of a theft and a 
lie ; as she had come to do out of a curious, proud, true 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


329 


instinct that was in her, and not surely from the teaching 
of any creature. 

She in her way loved the man who walked beside her ; 
but it was a love of which she was wholly unconscious ; 
a pity, a sorrow, a reverence, a passion, a deification, all 
combined, that had little or nothing in common with the 
loves of human kind, and which still left her speech as 
free, and her glance as fearless, with him as with any 
other. / 

He knew that; and he did not care to change it; it 
was singular, and gave her half her charm of savageness 
and innocence commingled. He answered her merely, 
with a smile ; 

“You are only a barbarian; how should you under- 
stand that the seductions of civilization lie in its multipli- 
cations of the forms of vice ? Men would not bear its 
3"oke an hour if it did not in return facilitate their sins. 
You are an outcast from it; — so you have kept your 
hands honest and your lips pure. You may be right to 
be thankful — I would not pretend to decide.” 

“At least — I would not be as they are,” she answered 
him with a curl of the mouth, and a gleam in her eyes : 
the pride of the old nomadic tribes, whose blood was in 
her, asserting itself against the claimed superiority of the 
tamed and hearth-bound races — blood that ran free and 
fearless to the measure of boundless winds and rushing 
waters ; that made the forest and the plain, the dawn and 
the darkness, the flight of the wild roe and the hiding- 
place of the wood pigeon, dearer than any roof-tree, 
sweeter than any nujUial bed. 

She had left the old life so long — so long that even her 
memories of it were dim as dreams, and its language had 
died off her lips in all save the broken catches of her 
songs; but the impulses of it were in her, vivid and in- 
eradicable, and the scorn with which the cowed and timid 
races of hearth and of homestead ragarded her, she, the 
daughter of Taric, gave back to them in tenfold measure. 

“ 1 would not be as they are !” she repeated, her eyes 
glancing through the sunshine of the cloudless day. 
“ To sit and spin ; to watch their soup-pot boil ; to spend 
their days under a close roof ; to shut the stars out, and 

28 * 


330 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


cover themselves in their beds, as swine do with their 
straw in the sty; to huddle all together in thousands, 
fearing to do what they will, lest the tongue of their 
neighbor wag evil of it ; to cheat a little and steal a little, 
and lie always when the false word serves them, and to 
mutter to themselves, ‘ God will wash us free of our sins,’ 
and then to go and sin again stealthily, thinking men will 
not see and sure that their God will give them a quit- 
tance ; — that is their life. I would not be as they are.” 

And her spirits rose, and her earliest life in the Liebana 
seemed to flash on her for one moment clear and bright 
through the veil of the weary years, and she walked erect 
and swiftly through the gorse, singing by his side the 
bold burden of one of the old sweet songs. 

And for the first time the thought passed over Arslan: 

“ This tameless wild doe would crouch like a spaniel, 
and be yoked as a beast of burden, — if I chose.” 

Whether or no he chose he was not sure. 

She was beautiful in her way ; barbaric, dauntless, in- 
nocent, savage ; he cared to hurt, to please, to arouse, to 
study, to portray her ; but to seek love from her he did 
not care. 

And yet she was most lovely in her own wild fashion 
like a young desert mare, or a seagull on the wing; and 
he wondered to himself that he cared for her no more, as 
he moved beside her through the thickets of the gorse and 
against the strong wind blowing from the sea. 

There was so little passion left in him. 

He had tossed aside the hair of dead women and por- 
trayed the limbs and the features of living ones till that 
ruthless pursuit had brought its own penalty with it ; and 
the beauty of women scarcely moved him more than did 
the plumage of a bird or the contour of a marble. His 
senses were drugged, and his heart was dead ; it was well 
that it should be so, he had taught himself to desire it ; 
and yet 

As they left the cliff-road for the pathless downs that 
led toward the summit of the rocks, they passed by a 
wayside hut, red with climbing creepers, and all alone on 
the sandy soil, like the little nest of a yellowhammer. 

Through its unclosed shutter the light of the sun 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


331 


streamed into it ; the interior was visible. It was very 
poor — a floor of mud, a couch of rushes ; a hearth on 
which a few dry sticks were burning ; walls lichen-covered 
and dropping moisture. Before the sticks, kneeling and 
trying to make them burn up more brightly to warm the 
one black pot that hung above them, was a poor peasant 
girl, and above her leaned a man who was her lover, a 
fisher of the coast, as poor, as hardy, and as simple as 
herself. 

In the man’s eye the impatience of love was shining, 
and as she lifted her head, after breathing with all her 
strength on the smoking sticks, he bent and drew her in 
his arms and kissed her rosy mouth and the white lids 
that drooped over her bright blue smiling northern eyes. 
She let the fuel lie still to blaze or smoulder as it would, 
and leaned her head against him, and laughed softly at 
his eagerness. Arslan glanced at them as he passed. 

“ Poor brutes 1” he muttered. “ Yet how happy they 
are I It must be well to be so easily content, and to find 
a ready-made fool’s paradise in a woman’s lips.” 

Folle-Farine hearing him, paused, and looked also. 
She trembled suddenly, and walked on in silence. " 

A new light broke on her, and dazzled her, and made 
her afraid : this forest-born creature, who had never known 
what fear was. 

The ground ascended as it stretched seaward, but on 
it there were only wide dull fields of colza or of grass 
lying, sickly and burning, under the fire of the late after- 
noou sun. The slope was too gradual to break their 
monotony. 

Above them was the cloudless weary blue ; below them 
was the faint parched green : other color there was none; 
one little dusky panting bird flew by pursued by a kite; 
that was the only change. 

She asked him no questions; she walked mutely and 
patiently by his side; she hated the dull heat, the color- 
less waste, the hard scorch of the air, the dreary change- 
lessness of the scene. But she did not say so. He had 
chosen to come to them. 

A league onward the fields were merged into a heath, 
uncultivated and covered with short prickly furze ; on the 


332 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


brown earth between the stunted bushes a few goats 
were cropping the burnt-up grasses. Here the slope 
grew sharper, and the earth seemed to rise up between 
the sky and them, steep and barren as a house-roof. 

Once he asked her, — 

“Are you tired 

She shook her head. 

Her feet ached, and her heart throbbed ; her limbs were 
heavy like lead in the heat and the toil. But she did not 
tell him so. She would have dropped dead from ex- 
haustion rather than have confessed to him any weak- 
ness. 

He took the denial as it was given, and pressed onward 
up the ascent. 

The sun was slanting towards the west; the skies 
seemed like brass; the air was sharp, yet scorching ; the 
dujl brown earth still rose up before them like a wall ; 
they climbed it slowly and painfully, their hands and 
their teeth filled with its dust, that drifted in a cloud be- 
fore them. He bade her close her eyes, and she obeyed 
him. He stretched his arm out and drew her after him 
up the ascent that was slippery from drought and prickly 
from the stunted growth of furze. 

On the summit he stood still and released her. 

■“ Now look.” 

She opened her eyes with the startled half-questioning 
stare of one led out from utter darkness into a full and 
sudden light. 

Then, with a cry, she sank down on the rock, trem- 
bling, weeping, laughing, stretching out her arms to the 
new glory that met her sight, dumb with its grandeur, 
delirious with its delight. ^ 

For what she saw was the sea. 

Before her dazzled sight all its beauty stretched, the 
blueness of the waters meeting the blueness of the skies ; 
radiant .with all the marvels of its countless hues; softly 
stirred by a low wind that sighed across it; bathed in 
a glow of gold that streamed on it from the westward ; 
rolling from north to south in slow sonorous measure, 
filling the silent air with ceaseless melody. The luster of 
the sunset beamed upon it ; the cool fresh smell of its 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


333 


water shot like new life through all the scorch and stupor 
of the day; its white foam curled and broke on the brown 
curving rocks and wooded inlets of the shores ; innumer- 
able birds, that gleamed like silver, floated or flew above 
its surface ; all was still, still as death, save only for the 
endless movement of those white swift wings and the 
susurrus of the waves, in which all meaner and harsher 
sounds of earth seemed lost and hushed to slumber and 
to silence. 

The sea alone reigned, as it reigned in the sweet young 
years of the earth when men were not ; as, maybe, it will 
be its turn to reign again in the years to come, when men 
and all their works shall have passed away and be no 
more seen nor any more remembered. 

Arslan watched her in silence. 

He was glad that it should awe and move her thus. 
The sea was the only thing for which he cared ; or which 
had any power over him. In the northern w'inter of his 
youth he had known the ocean in one wild night’s work 
undo all that men had done to check and rule it, and 
burst through all the barriers that they had raised against 
it, and throw down the stones of the altar and quench 
the tires of the hearth, and sweep through the fold and 
the byre, and flood the cradle of the child and the grave 
of the grandsire. He had seen the storms wash away at 
one blow the corn harvests of years, and gather in the 
sheep from the hills, and take the life of the shepherd 
with the life of the flock. He had seen it claim lovers 
locked in each other’s arms, and toss the fair curls of the 
first-born as it tossed the ribbon-weeds of its deeps. And 
he had felt small pity; it had rather given him a sense 
of rejoicing and triumph to see the water laugh to scorn 
those who were so wise in their own conceit, and bind 
beneath its chains those who held themselves masters 
over all beasts of the field and birds of the air. 

Other men dreaded tiie sea and cursed it ; but he in 
his way loved it almost with passion, and could he have 
chosen the manner of his death would have desired that 
it should be by the sea and through the sea ; a death 
cold and serene and dreamily voluptuous; a death on 


334 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


which no woman should look and in which no man 
should have share. 

He watched her now for some time without speakinj^. 
When the first paroxysm of her emotion had exhausted 
itself, she stood motionless, her figure like a statue of 
bronze against the sun, her head sunk upon her breast, 
her arms outstretched as though beseeching the wondrous 
brightness which she saw to take her to itself and make 
her one with it. Her whole attitude expressed an un- 
utterable worship. She was like one who for the first 
time hears of God. 

“What is it you feel?” he asked her suddenly. He 
knew without asking; but he had made it his custom to 
dissect all her joys and sufferings, with little heed whether 
he thus added to either. 

At the sound of his voice she started, and a shiver 
shook her as she answered him slowly, without with- 
drawing her gaze from the waters, — 

“It has been there always — always — so near me?” 

“Before the land, the sea was.” 

“ And I never knew !” 

Her head drooped on her breast ; tears rolled silently 
down her cheeks ; her arms fell to her sides ; she shivered 
again and sighed. She knew all she had lost — this is the 
greatest grief that life holds. 

“You never knew,” he made answer. “There was 
only a sand-hill between you and all this glory ; but the 
sand-hill was enough. Many people never climb theirs 
all their lives long.” 

The words and their meaning escaped her. 

She had for once no remembrance of him ; nor any 
other sense save of this surpassing wonder which had 
thus burst on her — this miracle that had been near her 
for so long, yet of which she had never in all her visions 
dreamed. 

She was quite silent ; sunk there on her knees, motion- 
less, and gazing straight, with eyes unbleuching, at the 
light. 

There was no sound near them, nor was there anything 
in sight except where above against the deepest azure of 
the sky two curlews were circling around each other, and 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


335 


iu the distance a single ship was gliding, with sails sil- 
vered by the sun. All signs of human life lay far behind ; 
severed from them by those steep scorched slopes swept 
only by the plovers and the bees. And all the while she 
looked the slow tears gathered in her eyes and fell, and 
the loud hard beating of her heart was audible in the 
hushed stillness of the upper air. 

lie waited awhile; then he spoke to her: 

“ Since it pains you come away.” 

A great sob shuddered through her. 

“ Give me that pain,” she muttered, “ sooner than any 
joy. Pain ? Pain ? — it is life, heaven, liberty I” 

For suddenly those words which she had heard spoken 
around her, and which had been scarcely more to her 
than they were to the deaf and the dumb, became real to 
her with a thousand meanings. Men use them uncon- 
sciously, figuring by them all the marvels of their exist- 
ence, all the agonies of thmr emotions, all the mysteries 
of their pangs and passions, foi-which they have no other 
names ; even so she used them now in the tumult of awe, 
in the torture of joy, that possessed her. 

Arslan looked at lier, and let her be. 

Passionless himself, except in the pursuit of his art, 
the passions of this untrained and intense nature had 
interest for him — the cold interest of analysis and dissec- 
tion, not of sympathy. As he portrayed her physical 
beauty scarcely moved by its flush of color and grace of 
mould, so he pursued the development of her mind 
searchingly, but with little pity and little tenderness. 

The seagulls were lost in the heights of the air ; the 
ship sailed on into the light till the last gleam of its can- 
vas vanished ; the sun sank westward lower and lower 
till it glowed iu a globe of flame upon the edge of the 
water : she never moved ; standing there on the summit 
of the cliff, with her head dropped upon her breast, her 
form thrown out dark and motionless against the gold of 
the western sky ; on her face still that look of one who 
worships with intense honor and passionate faith an un- 
known God. 

The sun sank entirely, leaving only a trail of flame 
across the heavens; the waters grew gray and purple 


336 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


in the shadows ; one boat, black against the crimson re- 
flections of the west, swept on swiftly with the in-rush- 
ing tide ; the wind rose and blew long curls of seaweed on 
the rocks ; the shores of the bay were dimmed in a heavy 
mist, through which the lights of the little hamlets dimly 
glowed, and the distant voices of fishermen calling to 
each other as they drew in their deep-sea nets came faint 
and weirdlike. 

Still she never moved ; the sea at her feet seemed to 
magnetize her, and draw her to it with some unseen / 
power. 

She started again as Arslan spoke. 

“ This is but a land-locked bay,” he said, with some con- 
tempt ; he who had seen the white aurora rise over the 
uutraversed ocean of an Arctic world. “ And it lies quiet 
enough there, like a duck-pool, in the twilight. Tell me, 
why does it move you so ?” 

She gave a heavy stifled si^h. 

“ It looks so free. And I ” 

On her there had vaguely come of late the feeling that 
she had only exchanged one tyranny for another ; that, 
leaving the dominion of ignorance, she had only entered 
into a slavery still sterner and more binding. In every 
vein of her body there leaped and flashed and lived the 
old free blood (rf an ever lawless, of an often criminal, 
race, and yet, though with its instincts of rebellion so 
strong in her, moving her to break all bonds and tear 
off all 3^okes, she was the slave of a slave — since she was 
the slave of love. This she did not know; but its weight 
was upon her. 

He heard with a certain pity. He was bound himself 
in the chain of poverty and of the world’s forgetfulness, 
and he had not even so much poor freedom as lies in the 
gilded imprisonment of fame. 

“ It is not free,” was all he answered her. “ It obeys 
the laws that govern it, and cannot evade them. Its 
flux and reflux are not liberty, but obedience— just such 
obedience to natural law as our life shows when it springs 
into being and slowly wears itself out and then perishes 
in its human form to live again in the motes of the air 
and the blades of the grass. There is no such thing as 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


33t 


liberty ; men have dreamed of it, but nature has never ac- 
corded it.” 

The words passed coldly over her: with her senses 
steeped in the radiance of light, that divinity of calm, 
that breadth of vision, that trance of awe, the chilliness 
and the bitterness of fact recoiled from off her intelligence, 
unabsorbed, as the cold rain-drops roll off a rose. 

“ It is so free !” she murmured, regardless of his words. 
“ If I had only known — I would have asked it to take me 
so long ago. To float dead on it — as that bird floats — it 
would be so quiet there and it would not fling me back, I 
think. It would have pity.” 

Her voice was dreamy and gentle. The softness of an 
indescribable desire was in it. 

“ Is it too late ?” he said, with that cruelty which char- 
acterized all his words to her. “ Can you have grown in 
love with life ?” 

“You live,” she said, simply. 

He was silent; the brief innocent words rebuked him. 
They said, so clearly yet so unconsciously, the ‘influence 
that his life already had gained on hers, whilst hers was 
to him no more than the brown seaweed was to the rock 
on which the waters tossed it. 

“Let us go down !” he said, abruptly, at length; “it 
grows late.” 

With one longing backward look she obeyed him, mov- 
ing like a creature in a dream, as she went away, along 
the side of the cliff through the shadows, while the goats 
lying down for their night’s rest started ,and fled at the 
human footsteps. 


29 


338 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


CHAPTER YIIL 

She was his absolute slave ; and he used his influence 
with little scruple. Whatever he told her she believed ; 
whatever he desired, she obeyed. 

With little effort he persuaded her that to lend her 
beauty to the purpose of his art was a sacriGce pure and 
supreme ; repaid, it might be, with immortality, like the 
immortality of the Mona Lisa. 

It was ever painful and even loathsome to her to give 
her beauty to the callous scrutiny and to the merciless 
imitations of art ; it stung the dignity and the purity 
that were inborn in this daughter of an outlawed people ; 
it wounded, and hurt, and humiliated her. She knew 
that these things were only done that one day the eyes 
of thousands and of tens of thousands might gaze on 
them ; and the knowledge was hateful to her. 

But as she would have borne wood or carried water for 
him, as she would have denied her lips the least morsel 
of bread that his might have fed thereon, as she would 
have gone straight to the river’s edge at his bidding, and 
have stood still for the stream to swell and the floods to 
cover her, so she obeyed him, and let him make of her 
what he would. 

He painted or sketched her in nearly every attitude, 
and rendered her the center of innumerable stories. 

He placed her form in the crowd of dancing- women 
that followed after Barabbas. He took her for Perse- 
phone, as for Phryne. He couched her on the bleak 
rocks and the sea-sands on barren Tenedos. He made 
her beauty burn through the purple vines and the roses 
of silence of the Yenusberg. He drew her as the fairest 
spirit fleeing with the autumn leaves in her streaming 
hair from the pursuit of his own Storm God Othyr. He 
portrayed her as Daphne, with all her soft human form 
changing and merging into the bitter roots and the poi- 
sonous leaves of the laurel that was the fruit of passion. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


339 


He drew her as Leonice, whose venal lips yet, being 
purified by a perfect love, were sealed mute unto death, 
and for love’s sake spoke not. 

He sketched her in a hundred shapes and for a hundred 
stories, taking her wild deerlike grace, and her supple 
mountain-bred strength, and her beauty which had all the 
richness and the freshness that sun and wind and rain 
and the dews of the nights can give, taking these as he 
in other years had taken the bloom of the grape, the 
blush of the seashell, the red glow of the desert reed, 
the fleeting glory of anything that, by its life or by its 
death, would minister to his dreams or his desires. 

Of all the studies he made from her — he all the while 
cold to her as any priest of old to the bird that he seethed 
in its blood on his altars of sacrifice, — those which were 
slightest of all, yet of all pleased him best, were those 
studies which were fullest of that ruthless and unsparing 
irony with which, in every stroke of his pencil, he cut as 
with a knife into the humanity he dissected. 

In the first, he painted her in all the warm, dreaming, 
palpitating slumber of youth, asleep in a field of poppies : 
thousands of brilliant blossoms were crushed under her 
slender, pliant, folded limbs; the intense scarlet of the 
dream-flowers burned everywhere, above, beneath, around 
her ; purple shadow and amber light contended for the 
mastery upon her ; her arms were lightly tossed above 
her head ; her mouth smiled in her dreams ; over her a 
butterfly flew, spreading golden wings to the sun; against 
her breast the great crimson cups of the flowers of sleep 
curled and glowed ; among them, hiding and gibbering 
and glaring at her with an elf’s eyes, was the Red Mouse 
of the Brocken — the one touch of pitiless irony, of un- 
sparing metaphor, that stole like a snake through the 
hush and the harmony and the innocence of repose. 

In the second, there was still the same attitude, the 
same solitude, the same rest, but the sleep was the sleep 
of death. Stretched on a block of white marble, there 
were the same limbs, but livid and lifeless, and twisted 
in the contortions of a last agony: there was the same 
loveliness, but on it the hues of corruption already had 
stolen ; the face was still turned upward, but the blank 


340 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


eyes stared hideously, and the mouth was drawn back 
from teeth closely clinched ; upon the stone there lay a 
surgeon’s knife and a sculptor’s scalpel ; between her lips 
the Red Mouse sat, watching, mouthing, triumphant. 
All the beauty was left still, but it was left ghastly, dis- 
colored, ruined, — ready for the mockery of the clay, for 
the violation of the knife, — ready for the feast of the blind 
worm, for the narrow home dug in darkness and in dust. 

And these two pictures were so alike and yet so unlike, 
so true to all the glory of youth, so true to all the ghast- 
liness of death, that they were terrible ; they were terri- 
ble even to the man who drew them with so unsparing 
and unfaltering a hand. 

Only to her they were not terrible, because they 
showed his power, because they were his will and work. 
She had no share in the shudder, which even he felt, at 
that visible presentiment of the corruption to which her 
beauty in its human perfection was destined : since it 
pleasured him to do it, that was all she cared. She 
would have given her beauty to the scourge of the popu- 
lace, or to the fish of the sea, at his bidding. 

She had not asked him even what the Red Mouse 
meant. 

She was content that he should deal with her in all 
things as he would. That such portrayals of her were 
cruel she never once thought : to her all others had been 
so brutal that the cruelties of Arslan seemed sweet as the 
south wind. 

To be for one instant a thing in the least wished for 
and endeared was to her a miracle so wonderful and so 
undreamt of, that it made her life sublime to her. 

“ Is that all the devil has done for you ?” cried the 
gardener’s wife from the vine-hung lattice, leaning out 
while the boat from Yprhs went down the water-street 
beneath. 

“ It were scarcely worth while to be his offspring if he 
deals you no better gifts than that. He is as niggard as 
the saints are — the little mean beasts I Do you know 

that the man who paints you brings death, they say 

sooner or later — to every creature that lives again for 
him in his art 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


341 


Folle-Farine, beneath in the dense brown shadows cast 
from the timbers of the leaning houses, raised her eyes ; 
the eyes smiled, and yet they had a look in them that 
chilled even the mocking, careless, wanton temper of the 
woman who leaned above among the roses. 

“ I have heard it,” she said, simply, as her oar broke 
the shadows. 

“And you have no fear 

“ I have no fear.” 

The gardener’s wife laughed aloud, the silver pins 
shaking in her yellow tresses. 

“ Well — the devil gives strength, no doubt. But I 
will not say much for the devil’s wage. A fine office he 
sets you — his daughter — to lend yourself to a painter’s 
eyes like any wanton that he could hire in the market- 
place for a drink of wine. If the devil do no better than 
that for you — his own-begotten — I will cleave close to 
the saints and the angels henceforth, though they do take 
all the gemis and the gold and the lace for their altars, 
and bestow so little in answer.” 

The boat had passed on with slow and even measure ; 
no words of derision which they could cast at her had 
power to move her any more than the fret of the ruffling 
rooks had power to move the cathedral spires around 
which they beat with their wings the empty air. 

The old dull gray routine of perpetual toil was illumined 
and enriched. If any reviled, she heard not. If any 
flung a stone at her, she caught it and dropped it safely 
on the grass, and went on with a glance of pardon. 
When the children ran after her footsteps bawling and 
mouthing, she turned and looked at them with a sweet 
dreaming tenderness in her eyes that rebuked them and 
held them silenced and afraid. 

Now, she hated none; nor could she envy any. 

The women were welcome to their little joys of hearth 
and home ; they were welcome to look for their lovers 
across the fields with smiling eyes shaded from the sun, 
or to beckon their infants from the dusky orchards to 
murmur fond foolish words and stroke the curls of flaxen 
down, — she begrudged them nothing: she, too, had her 
29 ’^ 


342 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


portion and her treasure ; she, too, knew the unutterable 
and mystical sweetness of a human joy. 

Base usage cannot make base a creature that gives 
itself nobly, purely, with unutterable and exhaustless 
love ; and whilst the people in the country round mut- 
tered at her for her vileness and disgrace, she, all un- 
witting and raised high above the reach of taunt and cen- 
sure by a deep speechless joy that rendered hunger, and 
labor, and pain, and brutal tasks, and jibing glances in- 
different to her — nay, unfelt — went on her daily ways 
with a light richer than the light of the sun in her eyes, 
and in her step the noble freedom of one who has broken 
from bondage and entered into a heritage of grace. 

She was proud as with the pride of one selected for 
some great dignity ; proud with the pride that a supreme 
devotion and a supreme ignorance made possible to her. 
He was as a god to her ; and she had found favor in 
his sight. Although by all others despised, to him she 
was beautiful ; a thing to be desired, not abhorred ; to be 
caressed, not cursed. It seemed to her so wonderful 
that, night and day, in her heart she praised God for it 
— that dim unknown God of whom no man had taught 
her, but yet whom she had vaguely grown to dream of 
and to honor, and to behold in the setting of the sun, 
and in the flush of the clouds, and in the mysteries of the 
starlit skies. 

Of shame to her in it she had no thought : a passion 
strong as fire in its force, pure as crystal in its unselfish- 
ness, possessed her for him, and laid her at his feet to be 
done with as he would. She would have crouched to 
him like a dog; she would have worked for him like a 
slave ; she would have killed herself if he had bidden her 
without a word of resistance or a moan of regret. To 
be caressed by him one moment as his hand in passing 
caressed a flower, even though with the next to be 
broken like the flower and cast aside in a ditch to die, 
was to her the greatest glory life could know, 'fo be a 
pleasure to him for one hour, to see his eyes tell her once, 
however carelessly or coldly, that she had any beauty 
for him, was to her the sweetest and noblest fate that 
could befall her. To him she was no more than the 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


343 


cluster of grapes to the wayfarer, who brushes their 
bloom off and steals their sweetness, then casts them 
down to be trampled on by whosoever the next comer 
be. But to this creature, who had no guide except her 
instincts of passion and sacrifice, who had no guard ex- 
cept the pure scorn that had kept her from the meanness 
and coarseness of the vices around her, this was unin- 
telligible, unsuspected ; and if she had understood it, she 
would have accepted it mutely, in that abject humility 
which had bent the fierce and dauntless temper in her to 
his will. 

To be of use to him, — to be held of any worth to him, 
— to have his eyes find any loveliness to study in her, — 
to be to him only as a flower that he broke off its stem 
to copy its bloom on his canvas and then cast out on the 
land to wither as it would, — this, even this, seemed to 
her the noblest and highest fate to which she could have 
had election. 

That he only borrowed the color of her cheek and the 
outline of her limbs as he had borrowed a thousand times 
ere then the venal charms of the dancing-women of 
taverns and play-houses, and the luring graces of the 
wanton that strayed in the public ways, was a knowl- 
edge that never touched her with its indignity. To her 
his art was a religion, supreme, passionless, eternal, 
whose sacrificial fires ennobled and consecrated all that 
they consumed. 

“ Though I shall die as the leaf dies in my body, yet 
I shall live forever embalmed amidst the beauty of his 
thoughts,” she told herself perpetually, and all her life 
became transfigured. 


344 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


CHAPTER IX 

One evening he met her in the fields on the same spot 
where Marcellin first had seen her as a child among the 
scarlet blaze of the poppies. 

The lands were all yellow with saffron and emerald 
with the young corn ; she balanced on her head a great 
brass jar ; the red girdle glowed about her waist as she 
moved ; the wind stirred the folds of her garments ; her 
feet were buried in the shining grass ; clouds tawny and 
purple were behind her ; she looked like some Moorish 
phantom seen in a dream under a sky of Spain. 

He paused and gazed at her with eyes half content, 
half cold. 

She was of a beauty so uncommon, so strange, and all 
that was his for his art: — a great artist, whether in words, 
in melody, or in color, is always cruel, or at the least 
seems so, for all things that live under the sun are to him 
created only to minister to his one inexorable passion. 

Art is so vast ; and human life is so little. 

It is to him only supremely just that the insect of an 
hour should be sacrificed to the infinite and eternal truth 
which must endure until the heavens themselves shall 
wither as a scroll that is held in a flame. It might have 
seemed to Arslan base to turn her ignorance and submis- 
sion to his will, to the gratification of his amorous pas- 
sions; but to make these serve the art to which he had 
himself abandoned every earthly good was in his sight 
justified, as the death agonies of the youth whom they 
decked with roses and slew in sacrifice to the sun were 
in the sight of the Mexican nation. 

The youth whom the Mexicans slew, on the high hill 
of the city, with his face to the west, was always the 
choicest and the noblest of all the opening flower of their 
manhood : for it was his fate to be called to enter into 
the realms of eternal light, and to dwell face to face with 
the unbearable brightness without whose rays the uni- 
verse would have perished frozen in perpetual night. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


345 


So the artist, who is true to his art, regards every 
human sacrifice that he renders up to it; how can he feel 
pity for a thing which perishes to feed a flame that he 
deems the life of the world ? 

The steel that he draws out from the severed heart of 
his victim he is ready to plunge into his own vitals: no 
other religion can vaunt as much of its priests. 

“What are you thinking of to-night?” he asked her 
where she came through the fields by the course of a little 
flower-sown brook, fringed with tall bulrushes and wav- 
ing willow-stems. 

She lifted her eyelids with a dreamy and wistful regard. 

“1 was thinking, — I wonder what the reed felt that 
you told me of, — the one reed that a god chose from all 
its millions by the waterside and cut down to make into 
a flute.” 

“Ah? — you see there are no reeds that make music 
nowadays ; the reeds are only good to be woven into 
creels for the fruits and the fish of the market.” 

“ That is not the fault of the reeds ?” 

“ Not that I know ; it is the fault of men most likely 
who find the chink of coin in barter sweeter music than 
the song of the syrinx. But what do you think the reed 
felt then ? — pain to be so sharply severed from its fel- 
lows ?” 

“ No — or the god would not have chosen it.” 

“What, then?” 

A troubled sigh parted her lips ; these old fables were 
fairest truths to her, and gave a grace to every humblest 
thing that the sun shone on, or the waters begat from 
their foam, or the winds blew with their breath into the 
little life of a day. 

“I was trying to think. But I cannot be sure. These 
reeds have forgotten. They have lost their soul. They 
want nothing but to feed among the sand and the mud, 
and grow in millions together, and shelter the toads and 
the newts, — there is not a note of music in them all — 
except when the wind rises and makes them sigh, and 
then they remember that long — long — ago, the breath of 
a great god was in them.” 

Arslan looked at her where she stood ; her eyes resting 


346 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


on the reeds, and the brook at her feet ; the crimson heat 
of the evening all about her, on the brazen amphora, on 
the red girdle on her loins, on the thoughtful parted lips, 
on the proud bent brows above which a golden butterfly 
floated as above the brows of Psyche. 

He smiled ; the smile that was so cold to her. 

“ Look : away over the fields, there comes a peasant 
with a sickle; he comes to mow down the reeds to make 
a bed for his cattle. If he heard you, he would think 
you mad.” 

“ They have thought me many things worse. What 
matter 

“ Nothing at all that I know. But you seem to envy 
that reed — so long ago — that was chosen ?” 

“ Who would not 

“Are you so sure? The life of the reed was always 
pleasant ; — dancing there in the light, playing with the 
shadows, blowing in the winds; with the cool waters all 
about it all day long, and the yellow daffodils and the 
blue bell-flowers for its brethren.” 

“Nay; — how do you know?” 

Her voice was low, and thrilled with a curious eager 
pain. 

“ How do you know ?” she murmured. “ Rather it 
was born in the sands, among the stones, of the chance 
winds, of the stray germs, — no one asking, no one heed- 
ing, brought by a sunbeam, spat out by a toad— no one 
caring where it dropped. Rather, — it grew there by the 
river, and such millions of reeds grew with it, that neither 
waters nor winds could care for a thing so common and 
worthless, but the very snakes twisting in and out de- 
spised it, and thrust the arrows of their tongues through 
it in scorn. And then — I think I see ! — the great god 
walked by the edge of the river, and he mused on a 
gift to give man, on a joy that should be a joy on the 
earth forever ; and he passed by the lily white as 
snow, by the thyme that fed the bees, by the gold 
heart in the arum flower, by the orange flame of the tall 
saiid-rush, by all the great water-blossoms which the 
sun kissed, and the swallows loved, and he came to the 
one little reed pierced with the snakes’ tongues, and all 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


347 ^ 


alone amidst millions. Then he took it up, and cut it to 
the root, and killed it; — killed it as a reed, — but breathed 
into it a song audible and beautiful to all the ears of men. 
Was that death to the reed ? — or life? Would a thou- 
sand summers of life by the waterside have been worth 
that one thrill of song when a god first spoke through it ?’^ 

Her face lightened with a radiance to which the pas- 
sion of her words was pale and poor; the vibrations of 
her voice grew sonorous and changing as the sounds of 
music itself; her eyes beamed through unshed tears as 
planets through the rain. 

She spoke of the reed and the god : — she thought of 
herself and of him. 

lie was silent. 

The reaper came nearer to them through the rosy haze 
of the evening, and cast a malignant eye upon them, and 
bent his back and drew the curve of his hook through the 
rushes. 

Arslan watched the sweep of the steel. 

“ The reeds only fall now for the market,” he said, 
with a smile that was cruel. “And the gods are all 
dead — Folle-Farine. ” 

She did not understand ; but her face lost its color, her 
heart sunk, her lips closed. She went on, treading down 
the long coils of the wild strawberries and the heavy 
grasses wet with the dew. 

The glow from the west died, a young moon rose, the 
fields and the skies grew dark. 

He looked, and let her go ; — alone. 

In her, Hermes, pitiful for once, had given him a syrinx 
through which all sweetest and noblest music might have 
been breathed. But Hermes, when he gives such a gift, 
leaves the mortal on whom he bestows it to-make or to 
miss the music as he may ; and to Arslan, his reed was 
but a reed as the rest were — a thing that bloomed for a 
summer-eve — a thing of the stagnant water and drifting 
sand — a thing that lived by the breath of the wind — a 
thing that a man should cut down and weave in a crown 
for a day, and then cast aside on the stream, and neither 
regret nor in any wise remember — a reed of the river, as 
the rest were. 


BOOK V. 


CHAPTER I. 

“ Only a little gold I” he thought, one day, looking on 
the cartoon of the Barabbas. “ As much as I have flung 
away on a dancing-woman, or the dancing-woman on the 
jewel for her breast. Only a little gold, and 1 should be 
free ; and with me these^ 

The thought escaped him unawares in broken words, 
one day, when he thought himself alone. 

This was a perpetual torture to him, this captivity and 
penury, this aimlessness and fruitlessness, in which his 
years were drifting, spent in the dull bodily labor that 
any brainless human brute could execute as well as he, 
consuming his days in physical fatigues that a roof he 
despised might cover him, and a bread which was bitter 
as gall to him might be his to eat ; knowing all the while 
that the real strength which he possessed, the real power 
that could give him an empire amidst his fellows, was 
dying away in him as slowly but as surely as though his 
brain were feasting fishes in the river-mud below. 

So little I — ^just a few handfuls of the wealth that cheats 
and wantons, fools and panders, gathered and scattered 
so easily in that world with which he had now no more 
to do than if he were lying in his grave ; — and having 
this, he would be able to compel the gaze of the world, 
and arouse the homage of its flinching fear, even if it should 
still continue to deny him other victories. 

It was not the physical privations of poverty which 
could daunt him. His boyhood had been spent in a 
healthful and simple training, amidst a strong and hardy 
mountain-people. 

( 348 ) 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


349 


It was nothing to him to make his bed on straw; to 
bear hunger unblenchingly ; to endure cold and heat, and 
all the freaks and changes of wild weather. 

In the long nights of a northern winter he had fasted 
for weeks on a salted fish and a handful of meal ; on the 
polar seas he had passed a winter ice-blocked, with famine 
kept at bay only by the flesh of the seal, and men dying 
around him raving in the madness of thirst. 

None of the physical ills of poverty could appall him; 
but its imprisonment, its helplessness, the sense of utter 
weakness, the impotence to rise and go to other lands and 
other lives, the perpetual narrowness and darkness in 
which it compelled him to abide, all these were horrible 
to him ; he loathed them as a man loathes the irons on 
his wrists, and the stone vault of his prison-cell. 

“ If I had only money !” he muttered, looking on his 
Barabbas, “ever so little — ever so ITttle I” 

For he knew that if he had as much gold as he had 
thrown away in earlier times to the Syrian beggar who 
had sat to him on his house-top at Damascus, he could go 
to a city and make the work live in color, and try once 
more to force from men that wonder and that fear which 
are the highest tributes that the multitude can give to the 
genius that arises amidst it. 

There was no creature in the chamber with him, except 
the spiders that wove in the darkness among the timbers. 

It was only just then dawn. The birds were singing 
in the thickets of the water’s edge; a blue kingfisher 
skimmed the air above the rushes, and a dragon-fly hunted 
insects over the surface of the reeds by the shore ; the 
swallows, that built in the stones of the tower, were 
wheeling to and fro, glad and eager for the sun. 

Otherwise it was intensely silent. 

In the breadth of shadow still cast across the stream 
by the walls of the tower, the market-boat of Ypr^s glided 
by, and the soft splash of the passing oars was a sound 
too familiar to arouse him. 

But, unseen, Folle-Farine, resting one moment in her 
transit to look up at that grim gray pile in which her 
paradise was shut, watching and listening with the fine- 

30 


350 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


strung senses of a great love, heard through the open 
casement the muttered words which, out of the bitterness 
of his heart, escaped his lips unconsciously 

She heard and understood. 

Although a paradise to her, to him it was only a prison. 

“ It is with him as with the great black eagle that they 
keep in the bridge-tower, in a hole in the dark, with wings 
cut close and a stone tied to each foot,” she thought, as 
she went on her way noiselessly down with the ebb-tide 
on the river. And she sorrowed exceedingly for his sake. 

She knew nothing of all that he remembered in the 
years of his past — of all that he had lost, whilst yet 
young, as men should only lose their joys in the years of 
their old age ; she knew nothing of the cities and the 
habits of the world — nothing of the world’s pleasures and 
the world’s triumphs. 

To her it had always seemed strange that he wanted 
any other life than this which he possessed. To her, the 
freedom, the strength, the simplicity of it, seemed noble, 
and all that the heart of a man could desire from fate. 

Going forth at sunrise to his daily labor on the broad 
golden sheet of the waters, down to the sight and the 
sound and the smile of the sea, and returning at sunset to 
wander at will through the, woods and the jtastures in the 
soft evening shadows, or to watch and portray with the 
turn of his wrist the curl of each flower, the wonder of 
every cloud, the smile in any woman’s eyes, the gleam 
of any moonbeam through the leaves ; or to lie still on 
the grass or the sand by the shore, and see the armies of 
the mists sweep by over his head, and hearken to the 
throb of the nightingale’s voice through the darkness, 
and mark the coolness of the dews on the hollow of his 
hand, and let the night go by in dreams of worlds beyond 
the stars ; — such a life as this seemed to her beyond any 
other beautiful. 

A life in the air, on the tide, in the light, in the wind, 
in the sound of salt waves, in the smell of wild thyme, 
with no roof to come between him and the sky, with no 
need to cramp body and mind in the cage of a street — a 
life spent in the dreaming of dreams, and full of vision 
and thought as the summer was full of its blossom and 


1 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


351 


fruits, — it seemed to her the life that must needs be best 
for a man, since the life that was freest, simplest, and 
highest. 

She knew nothing of the lust of ambition, of the desire 
of fame, of the ceaseless unrest of the mind which craves 
the world’s honor, and is doomed to the world’s neglect ; 
of the continual fire which burns in the hands which 
stretch themselves in conscious strength to seize a scepter 
and remain empty, only struck in the palm by the buffets 
of fools. 

Of these she knew nothing. 

She had no conception of them — of the weakness and 
the force that twine one in another in such a temper as 
his. She was at once above them and beneath them. 
She could not comprehend that he who could so bitterly 
disdain the flesh-pots and the wine-skins of the common 
crowd, yet could stoop to care for the crowd’s Hosannas. 

But yet this definite longing which she overheard in 
the words that escaped him she could not mistake ; it 
was a longing plain to her, one that moved all the dullest 
and most brutal souls around her. All her years through 
she had seen the greed of gold, or the want of it, the 
twin rulers of the only little dominion that she knew. 

Money, in her estimate of it, meant only some little 
sum of copper pieces, such as could buy a hank of flax, a 
load of sweet chestnuts, a stack of wood, a swarm of 
bees, a sack of autumn fruits. What in cities would have 
been penury, was deemed illimitable riches in the home- 
steads and cabins which had been her only world. 

“A little gold I — a little gold I” she pondered cease- 
lessly, as she went on down the current. She knew that 
he only craved it, not to purchase any pleasure for his 
appetites or for his vanities, but as the lever whereby he 
would be enabled to lift off him that iron weight of 
adverse circumstance which held him down in darkness 
as the stones held the caged eagle. 

“A little gold 1” she said to herself again and again as 
the boat drifted on to the town, with the scent of the 
mulberries, and the herbs, and the baskets of roses, which 
were its cargo for the market, fragrant on the air. 

“A little gold I” 


352 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


It seemed so slight a thing, and the more cruel, because 
so slight, to stand thus between him and that noonday 
splendor of fame which he sought to win in his obscurity 
and indigence, as the blinded eagle in his den still turned 
his aching eyes by instinct to the sun. Her heart was 
weary for him as she went. 

“ What use for the gods to have given him back life,” 
she thought, “if they must give him thus with it the 
incurable fever of an endless desire ?” 

It was a gift as poisoned, a granted prayer as vain, as 
the immortality- which they had given to Tithonus. 

“A little gold,” he had said: it seemed a thing almost 
within her grasp. 

Had she been again willing fo steal from Flamma, she 
could have taken it as soon as the worth of the load she 
carried should have been paid to her; but by a theft slie 
would not serve Arslan now. No gifts would she give 
him but what should be pure and worthy of his touch. 
She pondered and pondered, cleaving the waters with 
dull regular measure, and gliding under the old stone 
arches of the bridge into the town. 

When she brought the boat back up the stream at 
noonday, her face had cleared ; her mouth smiled ; she 
rowed on swiftly, with a light sweet and glad in her 
eyes. 

A thought had come to her. 

In the markei-})hice that day she had heard two women 
talk together, under the shade of their great red umbrel- 
las, over their heaps of garden produce, 

“ So thou hast bought the brindled calf after all ! Thou 
art in luck.” 

“Ay, in luck indeed, for the boy to rout up the old 
pear-tree and find those queer coins beneath it. The tree 
liad stood there all my father’s and grandfather’s time, 
and longer too, for aught I know, and no one ever 
dreamed there was any treasure at the root ; but he took 
a fancy to dig up the tree ; he said it looked like a ghost, 
with its old gray arms, and he wanted to plant a young 
cherry.” 

“ There must have been a mass of coin ?” 

“ No, — only a few little shabby, bent pieces. But the 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


353 


lad took them up to the Prince Sartorian ; and he is 
always crazed about the like; and he sent us for them 
quite a roll of gold, and said that the coins found were, 
beyond a doubt, of the Julian time — whatever he might 
mean by that.’’ 

“ Sartorial! will buy any rubbish of that sort. For my 
part, I think if one buried a brass button only long 
enough, he would give one a bank-note for it.” 

“ They say there are marble creatures of his that cost 
more than would dower a thousand brides, or pension a 
thousand soldiers. I do not know about that. My boy 
did not get far in the palace ; but he said that the hall 
he waited in was graven with gold and precious stones. 
One picture he saw in it was placed on a golden altar, as 
if it were a god. To worship old coins, and rags of can- 
vas, and idols of stone like that, — how vile it is I while 
we are glad to get a nettle-salad off the edge of the road.” 

“But the coins gave thee the brindled calf” 

“ That was no goodness to us. Sartorian has a craze 
for such follies.” 

Folle-Farine had listened, and, standing by them, for 
once spoke : 

“ Who is Sartorian ? Will you tell me?” 

The women were from a far-distant village, and had 
not the infinite horror of her felt by those who lived in 
the near neighborhood of the mill of Yprbs. 

“ He is a great noble,” they answered her, eyeing her 
with suspicion. 

“And where is his dwelling?” 

“Near Rioz. What do the like of you want with the 
like of the Prince ?” 

She gave them thanks for their answers, and turned 
away in silence with a glow at her heart. 

“ What is that wicked one thinking of now, that she 
asks for such as the Prince Sartorian ?” said the women, 
crossing themselves, repentant that they had so far for- 
gotten thetnselves as to hold any syllable of converse 
with the devil’s daughter. 

An old man plucking birds near at hand chuckled low 
in his throat : 

“ Maybe she knows that Sartorian will give yet more 
30 * 


354 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


gold for new faces than for old coins; and — how hand- 
some she is, the black-browed witch !” 

She had passed away through the crowds of the market, 
and did not hear. 

“ I go to llioz myself in two days’ time with the mules,” 
she thought; and her heart rose, her glance lightened, she 
moved through the people with a step so elastic, and a 
face so radiant from the flush of a new hope, that they 
fell away from her with an emotion which for once was 
not wholly hatred. 

That night, when the mill-house was quiet, and the 
moonbeams fell through all its small dim windows and 
checkered all its wooden floors, she rose from the loft 
where she slept, and stole noiselessly down the steep 
stairway to the chamber where the servant Pitchou slept. 

It was a little dark chamber, with jutting beams and 
a casement that was never unclosed. 

On a nail hung the blue woolen skirt and the linen cap 
of the woman’s working-dress. In a corner was a little 
image of a saint and a string of leaden beads. 

On a flock pallet the old wrinkled creature slept, tired 
out with the labor of a long day’s work among the cab- 
bage-beds and rows of lettuces, muttering as she slept of 
the little daily peculations that were the sweet sins of 
her life and of her master’s. 

She cared for her soul — cared very much, and tried to 
save it ; but cheating was dear to her, and cruelty was 
natural : she tricked the fatherless child in his measure 
of milk for the tenth of a sou, and wrung the throat of the 
bullfinch as it sang, lest he should peck the tenth of a 
cherry. 

Folle-Farine went close to the straw bed and laid her 
hand on the sleeper. 

“ Wake ! I want a word with you.” 

Pitchou started, struggled, glared with wide-open eyes, 
and gasped in horrible fear. 

, Folle-Farine put the other hand on her mouth. 

“ Listen 1 The night I was brought here you stole the 
sequins olf my head. Give them back to me now, or I 
will kill you where you lie.” 

The grip of her left hand on the woman’s throat, and 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


365 


the gleam of her knife in the right, were enough, as she 
had counted they would be. 

Old Pitchou struggled, lied, stammered, writhed, strove 
to scream, and swore her innocence of this theft which 
had waited eleven years to rise against her to Mary and 
her angels ; but in the end she surrendered, and tottered 
on her shuddering limbs, and crept beneath her bed, and 
with terror and misery brought forth from her secret hole 
in the rafters of the floor the little chain of shaking sequins. 

It had been of no use to her : she had always thought 
it of inestimable value, and could never bring herself to 
part from it, visiting it night and day, and being perpet- 
ually tormented with the dread lest her master should 
discover and claim it. 

Folle-Farine seized it from her silently, and laughed — 
a quiet cold laugh — at the threats and imprecations of 
the woman who had robbed her in her infancy. 

“ How can you complain of me, without telling also 
of your own old sin she said, with contempt, as she 
quitted the chamber. “ Shriek away as you choose ; the 
chain is mine, not yours. I was weak when you stole it; 
1 am strong enough now. You had best not meddle, or 
you will have thej^vorst of the reckoning.’’ 

And she shut the door on the old woman’s screams and 
left her, knowing well that Pitchou would not dare to 
summon her master. 

It was just daybreak. All the world was still dark. 

She slipped the sequins in her bosom, and went back 
to her own bed of hay in the loft. 

There was no sound in the darkness but the faint 
piping of young birds that felt the coming of day long 
ere the grosser senses of humanity could have seen a 
glimmer of light on the black edge of the eastern clouds. 

She sat on her couch with the Moorish coins in her 
hand, and gazed upon them. They were very precious 
to her. She had never forgotten or ceased to desire 
them, though to possess herself of them' by force had 
never occurred to her until that night. Their theft had 
been a wrong which she had never pardoned, yet she had 
never avenged it until now. 


356 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


As she held them in her hand for the first time in eleven 
years, a strong emotion came over her. 

The time when she had worn them came out suddenly 
in sharp relief from the haze of her imperfect memories. 
All the old forest-life for a moment revived for her. 

The mists of the mountains, the smell of the chestnut- 
woods, the curl of the white smoke among the leaves, the 
sweet wild strains of the music, the mad grace of the old 
Moorish dances, the tramp through the hill-passes, the 
leap and splash of the tumbling waters, — all arose to her 
for one moment from the oblivion in which years of toil 
and exile had buried them. 

The tears started to her eyes; she kissed the little 
glittering coins, she thought of Phratos. 

She had never known his fate. 

The gypsy who had been found dead in the fields had 
been forgotten by the people before the same snows which 
had covered his body had melted at the first glimmer of 
the wintry sun. 

Flamma could have told her ; but he had never spoken 
one word in all her life to her, except in curt reprimand 
or in cruel irony. 

All the old memories had died out ; and no wanderers 
of her father’s race had ever come into the peaceful and 
pastoral district of the northern seaboard, where they 
could have gained no footing, and could have made no 
plunder. 

The sight of the little band of coins which had danced 
so often among her curls under the moonlit leaves in the 
Liebana to the leaping and tuneful measures of the viol 
moved her to a wistful longing for the smile and the 
voice of Phratos. 

“ 1 would never part with them for myself,” she 
thought; “I would die of hunger first — were it only 
myself.” 

And still she was resolved to part with them; to sell 
her single little treasure — the sole gift of the only creature 
who had ever loved her, even in the very first hour that 
she had recovered it. 

The sequins were worth no more than any baby’s 
woven crown of faded daisies ; but to her, as to the old 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


357 


peasant, they seemed, by their golden glitter, a source of 
wealth incalculable. 

At twilight that day, as she stood by Arslan, she spoke 
to him, timidly, — 

“ 1 go to Rioz with the two mul-es, at daybreak to- 
morrow, with flour for Flarama. It is a town larger than 
the one yonder. Is there anything I might do there — for 
you 

“Do? What should you do?” he answered her, with 
inattention and almost impatience ; for his heart was sore 
with the terrible weariness of inaction. 

She looked at him very wistfully, and her mouth parted 
a little as though to speak; but his repulse chilled the 
words that rose to her lips. 

She dared not say her thoughts to him, lest she should 
displease him. 

“ If it come to naught he had best not know, perhaps,” 
she said to herself. 

So she kept silence. 

On the morrow, before the sun was up, she set out on 
her way, with the two mules, to Rioz. 

It was a town distant some five leagues, lying to the 
southward. Both the mules were heavily laden with 
as many sacks as they could carry : she could ride on 
neither; she walked between them with a bridle held in 
either hand. 

The road was not a familiar one to her ; she had only 
gone thither some twice or thrice, and she did not find 
the way long, being full of her own meditations and 
hopes, and taking pleasure in the gleam of new waters 
and the sight of fresh fields, and the green simple loveli- 
ness of a pastoral country in late summer. 

She met few people ; a market-woman or two on their 
asses, a walking peddler, a shepherd, or a swineherd — 
these were all. 

The day was young, and none but the country people 
were astir. The quiet roads were dim with mists ; and 
the tinkle of a sheep’s bell was the only sound in the 
silence. 

It was mid-day when she entered Rioz; a town stand- 
ing in a dell, surrounded with apple-orchards and fields 


858 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


of corn and colza, with a quaint old square tower of the 
thirteenth century arising among its roofs, and round 
about it old moss:green ramparts whereon the bramble 
and the gorse grew wild. 

But as the morning advanced the mists lifted, the sun 
grew powerful ; the roads were straight and without 
shadow; the mules stumbled, footsore; she herself grew 
tired and fevered. 

She led her fatigued and thirsty beasts through the 
nearest gateway, where a soldier sat smoking, and a girl 
in a blue petticoat and a scarlet bodice talked to him, 
resting her hands on her hips, and her brass pails on the 
ground. 

She left the sacks of flour at their destination, which 
was a great bake-house in the center of the town ; stalled 
the mules herself in a shed adjoining the little crazy wine- 
shop where Flamma had bidden her bait them, and with 
her own hands unharnessed, watered, and foddered them. 

The wineshop had for sign a white pigeon ; it was 
tumble-down, dusky, half covered with vines that grew 
loose and entwined over each other at their own fancy; 
it had a little court in which grew a great walnut-tree ; 
there was a bench under the tree ; the shelter of its 
boughs was cool and very welcome in the full noon heat. 
The old woman who kept the place, wrinkled, shriveled, 
and cheery, bade her rest there, and she would bring her 
food and drink. 

But Folle-Farine, with one wistful glance at the shadow- 
ing branches, refused, and asked only the way to the 
house of the Prince Sartorian. 

The woman of the cabaret looked at her sharply, and 
said, as the market-women had said, “ What does the like 
of you want with the Prince ?’’ 

“ I want to know the way to it. If you do not tell it, 
another will,” she answered, as she moved out of the 
little courtyard. 

The old woman called after her that it was out by the 
west gate, over the hill through the fields for more than 
two leagues ; if she followed the wind of the water west- 
ward, she could not go amiss. 

“ What is that baggage wanting to do with Sartorian ?” 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


359 


she muttered, watching the form of the girl as it passed 
up the steep sunshiny street. 

“ Some evil, no doubt,” answered her assistant, a stal- 
wart wench, who was skinning a rabbit in the yard. 
“ You know, she sells bags of wind to founder the ships, 
they say, and the wicked herb, hon plaisir, and the phil- 
ters that drive men mad. She is as bad as a cajole.'’’ 

Her old mistress, going within to toss a fritter for one 
of the mendicant friars, chuckled grimly to herself: 

“ No one would ask the road there for any good ; that 
is sure. No doubt she had heard that Sartoriaii is a 
choice judge of color and shape in all the Arts !” 

F^lle-Farine went out by the gate, and along the water 
westward. 

In a little satchel she carried some half score of oil- 
sketches that he had given her, rich, graceful, shadowy 
things — girls^ faces, coils of foliage, river-rushes in the 
moonlight, a purple passion-flower blooming on a gray 
ruin ; a child, golden-headed and bare-limbed, wading in 
brown waters ; — things that had caught his sight and 
fancy, and had been transcribed, and then tossed aside 
with the lavish carelessness of genius. 

She asked one or two peasants, whom she met, her 
way ; they stared, and grumbled, and pointed to some 
distant towers rising out of wooded slopes, — those they 
said were the towers of the dwelling of Prince Sartorian. 

One hen-huckster, leading his ass to market with a load 
of live poultry, looked over his shoulder after her, and 
muttered with a grin to his wife : 

“ There goes a handsome piece of porcelain for the old 
man to lock in his velvet-lined cupboards.” 

And the wife laughed in answer, — 

“Ay; she will look well, gilded as Sartorian always 
gilds what he buys.” 

The words came to the ear of Folle-Farine : she won- 
dered what they could mean ; but she would not turn 
back to ask. 

Her feet were weary, like her mules’ ; the sun scorched 
her; she felt feeble, and longed to lie down and sleep; 
but she toiled on up the sharp ascent that rose in cliffs of 
limestone above the valley where the river ran. 


360 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


At last she came to gates that were like those of the 
cathedral, all brazen, blazoned, and full of scrolls and 
shields. She pushed one open — there was no one there 
to say her nay, and boldly entered the domain which they 
guarded. 

At first it seemed ^0 be only like the woods at home ; 
the trees were green, the grass long, the birds sang, the 
rabbits darted. But by-and-by she went .farther ; she 
grew bewildered ; she was in a world strange to her. 

Trees she had never seen rose like the pillars of tem- 
ples ; gorgeous flowers, she had never dreamed of, played 
in the sun ; vast columns of water sprang aloft from the 
mouths of golden dragons or the silver breasts of dolphins ; 
nude women, wondrous, and white, and still, stood here 
and there amidst the leavy darkness. 

She paused among it all, dazzled, and thinking that she 
dreamed. 

She had never seen any gardens, save the gardens of 
the poor. 

A magnolia-tree was above her ; she stooped her face to 
one of its great, fragrant, creamy cups and kissed it softly. 
A statue of Clytie was beside her ; she looked timidly up 
at the musing face, and touched it, wondering why it was 
so very cold, and would not move or smile. 

A fountain flung up its spray beside her; she leaned 
and caught it, thinking it so much silver, and gazed at it 
in sorrowful wonder as it changed to water in her grasp. 
She walked on like one enchanted, silently, and thinking 
that she had strayed into some sorcerer’s kingdom ; she 
was not afraid, but glad. She walked on for a long while, 
always among these mazes of leaves, these splendors of 
blossom, these cloud-reaching waters, these marble forms 
so motionless and thoughtful. 

At last she came on the edge of a great pool, fringed 
with the bulrush and the lotos, and the white pampas- 
grass, and the flamelike flowering reed, of the East and 
of the West. 

All around, the pool was sheltered with dark woods of 
cedar and thickets of the sea-pine. Beyond them stood 
aloof a great pile that seemed to her to blaze like gold 
and silver in the sun. She approached it through a maze 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


361 


of roses, and ascended a flight of marble steps, on to a 
terrace. A door stood open near. She entered it. 

She was intent on the object of her errand, and she 
bad no touch of fear in her whole temper. 

Hall after hall, room after room, opened to her amazed 
vision ; an endless spectacle of marvelous color stretched 
before her eyes ; the wonders that are gathered together 
by the world’s luxury were for the first time in her sight; 
she saw for the first time in her life how the rich lived. 

She moved forward, curious, astonished, bewildered, 
but nothing daunted. 

On the velvet of the floors her steps trod as firmly and 
as freely as on the moss of the orchard at Ypres. Her 
eyes glanced as gravely and as fearlessly over the frescoed 
walls, the gilded woods, the jeweled cups, the broidered 
bangings, as over the misty pastures where the sheep 
were folded. 

It was not in the daughter of Taric to be daunted by 
the dazzle of mere wealth. She walked through the 
splendid and lonely rooms wondering, indeed, and eager 
to see more ; but there was no spell here such as the 
gardens bad flung over her. To the creature free born in 
the Liebana no life beneath a roof could seem beautiful. 

She met no one. 

At the end of the fourth chamber, which she traversed, 
she paused before a great picture in a heavy golden frame ; 
it was the seizure of Persephone. She knew the story, 
for Arslan had told her of it. 

She saw for the first time how the pictures that men 
called great were installed in princely splendor ; this was 
the fate which he wanted for his own. 

A little lamp, burning perfume with a silvery smoke, 
stood before it: she recalled the words of the woman in 
the market-place ; in her ignorance, she thought the pic- 
ture was worshiped as a divinity, as the people wor- 
shiped the great picture of the Virgin that they burned 
incense before in the cathedral. She looked, with some- 
thing of gloomy contempt in her eyes, at the painting 
which was mantled in massive gold, with purple draperies 
opening to display it; for it was the chief masterpiece 
upon those walls. 


31 


362 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


“And he cares for thatP^ she thought, with a sigh 
half of wonder, half of sorrow. 

She did not reason on it, but it seemed to her that his 
works were greater hanging on their bare walls where 
the spiders wove. 

“ Who is ‘ he’?” a voice asked behind her. 

She turned and saw a small and feeble man, with keen, 
humorous eyes, and an elfin face, delicate in its form, 
malicious in its meaning. 

She stood silent, regarding him ; herself a strange 
figure in that lordly place, with her brown limbs, her 
bare head and feet, her linen tunic, her red knotted girdle. 

“Who are you?’^ she asked him curtly, in counter- 
question. 

The little old man laughed. 

“ I have the honor to be your host.” 

A disappointed astonishment clouded her face. 

“You! are you Sartor ian ?” she muttered — “the Sar- 
torian whom they call a prince ?” 

“Even I!” he said with a smile. “I regret that I 
please you no more. May I ask to what I am indebted 
for your presence ? You seem a fastidious critic.” 

He spoke with good-humored irony, taking snuflf whilst 
he looked at the lustrous beauty of this barefooted gypsy, 
as he thought her, whom he had found thus astray in his 
magnificent chambers. 

She amused him j finding her silent, he sought to make 
her speak. 

“ How did you come in hither ? You care for pictures, 
perhaps, since you seem to feed on them like some wood- 
pigeons on a sheaf of corn ?” 

“I know of finer than yours,” she answered him 
coldly, chilled by the amused and malicious ridicule of 
his tone into a sullen repose. “ I did not come to see 
anything you have. I came to sell you these ; they say 
in Ypres that you care for such bits of coin.” 

She drew out of her bosom her string of sequins, and 
tendered them to him. 

He took them, seeing at a glance that they were of no 
sort of value ; such things as he could buy for a few 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


363 


coins in any bazaar of Africa or Asia. But he did not 
say so. 

He looked at her keenly, as he asked ; 

“ Whose were these 

She looked in return at him with haughty defiance. 

They are mine. If you want such things, as they 
sav you do, take them and give me their value — that is 
alf.’^ 

“ Do you come here to sell them 

“ Yes. I came three leagues to-day. I heard a woman 
from near Rioz say that you liked such things. Take 
them, or leave them.” 

“ Who gave them to you?” 

“ Phratos.” 

Her voice lingered sadly over the word. She still 
loved the memory of Phratos. 

“ And who may Phratos be ?” 

Her eyes flashed fire at the cross-questioning. 

“That is none of your business. If you think that I 
stole them, say so. If you want them, buy them. One 
or the other.” 

The old man watched her amusedly. 

“ You can be very fierce,” he said to her. “ Be gentle 
a little, and tell me whence you came, and what story you 
have.” 

But she would not. 

“ I have not come here to speak of myself,” she said 
obstinately. “ Will you take the coins, or leave them ?” 

“ I will take them,” he said ; and he went to a cabinet 
in another room and brought out with him several shin- 
ing gold pieces. 

She fastened her eager eyes on them thirstily. 

“ Here is payment,” he said to her, holding them to 
her. 

Her eyes fastened on the money entranced ; she touched 
it with a light, half-fearful touch, and then drew back and 
gazed at it amazed. 

“All that — all that?” she muttered. “Is it their 
worth ? Are you sure ?” 

“ Quite sure,” he said with a smile. He offered her in 
them some thirty times their value. 


864 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


She paused for a moment, incredulous of her own good 
fortune, then darted on them as a swallow at a gnat, and 
took them and put them to her lips, and laughed a sweet 
glad laugh of triumph, and slid them in her bosom. 

“ I am grateful,’’ she said simply ; but the radiance in 
her eyes, the laughter on her mouth, the quivering excite- 
ment in all her face and form, said the same thing for her 
far better than her words. 

The old man watched her narrowly. 

“ They are not for yourself?” he asked. 

“ That is my affair,” she answered him, all her pride 
rising in arms. “ What concerned you was their value.” 

He smiled and bent his head. 

“ Fairly rebuked. But say is this all you came for ? 
Wherever you came from, is this all that brought you 
here ?” 

She looked awhile in his eyes steadily, then she brought 
the sketches from their hiding-place. She placed them 
before him. 

‘‘ Look at those.” 

He took them to the b’ght and scanned them slowly 
and critically ; he knew all the mysteries and intricacies 
of art, and he recognized in these slight things the hand 
and the color of a master. He did not say so, but held 
them for some time in silence. 

“ These also are for sale ?” he asked at length. 

She had drawn near him, her face flushed with intense 
expectation, her longing eyes dilated, her scarlet lips 
quivering with eagerness. That he was a stranger and 
a noble was nothing to her: she knew he had wealth ; 
she saw he had perception. 

“See here !” she said, swiftly, the music of her voice 
rising and falling in breathless, eloquent intonation. 
“ Those things are to the great works of his hand as a 
broken leaf beside your gardens yonder. He touches a 
thing and it is beauty. He takes a reed, a stone, a 
breadth of sand, a woman’s face, and under his hand it 
grows glorious and gracious. He dreams things that are 
strange and sublime; he has talked with the gods, and 
he has seen the worlds beyond the sun. All the day he 
works for his bread, and in the gray night he wanders 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


365 


where none can follow him ; and he brings back marvels 
and mysteries, and beautiful, terrible stories that are like 
the sound of the sea. Yet he is poor, and no man sees 
the things of his hand ; and he is sick of his life, because 
the days go by and bring no message to him, and men 
will have nothing of him ; and he has hunger of body 
and hunger of mind. For me, if I could do what he 
does, I would not care though no man ever looked on it. 
Blit to him it is bitter that it is only seen by the newt, 
and the beetle, and the night-hawk. It wears his soul 
away, because he is denied of men. ‘ If I had gold, if I 
had gold I’ he says always, when he thinks that none can 
hear him.’’ 

Her voice trembled and was still for a second ; she 
struggled with herself and kept it clear and strong. 

The old man never interrupted her. 

“ He must not know : he would kill himself if he knew ; 
he would sooner die than tell any man. But, look you, 
you drape your pictures here with gold and with purple, 
you place them high in the light ; you make idols of them, 
and burn your incense before them. That is what he 
wants for his ; they are the life of his life. If they could 
be honored, he would not care, though you should slay 
him to-morrow. Go to him, and make you idols of his : 
they are worthier gods than yours. And what his heart 
is sick for is to have them seen by men. Were I he, I 
would not care ; but he cares, so that he perishes.” 

She shivered as she spoke ; in her earnestness and 
eagerness, she laid her hand on the stranger’s arm, and 
held it there; she prayed, with more passion than she 
would have cast into any prayer to save her own life. 

“Where is he; and what do you call him?” the old 
man asked her quietly. 

He understood the meaning that ran beneath the un- 
conscious extravagance of her fanciful and impassioned 
language. 

“He is called Arslkn ; he lives in the granary-tower, 
by the river, between the town and Ypr^s. He comes 
from the north, far away — very, very far, where the ^eas 
are all ice and the sun shines at midnight. Will you 
make the things that he does to be known to the people ? 

31 * 


366 


FOLLE-FARINE, 


You have gold ; and gold, he says, is the compeller of 
men.” 

“ Arslan ?” he echoed. 

The name was not utterly unknown to him ; he had 
seen works signed with it at Paris and at Rome — strange 
things of a singular power, of a union of cynicism and 
idealism, which was too coarse for one-half the world, 
and too pure for the other half. 

“Arslkn? — I think I remember. I will see what I 
can do.” 

“ You will say nothing to him of me.” 

“ I could not say much. Who are you ? Whence do 
you come ?” 

“ I live at the water-mill of Ypres. They say that 
Reine Flamma was my mother. I do not know : it does 
not matter.” 

“ What is your name ?” 

“ Folle-Farine. They called me after the mill-dust.” 

‘*A strange namesake.” 

“ What does it matter? Any name is only a little puff 
of breath — less than the dust, anyhow.” 

“ Is it ? I see, you are a Communist.” 

» What ?” 

“A Communist — a Socialist. You know what that is. 
You would like to level my house to the ashes, I fancy, 
by the look on your face.” 

“ No,” she said, simply, with a taint of scorn, “ I do 
not care to do that. If I had cared to burn anything it 
would have been the Flandrins’ village. It is odd that 
you should live in a palace and he should want for bread ; 
but then he can create things, and you can only buy them. 
So it is even, perhaps.” 

The old man smiled, amused. 

“You are no respecter of persons, that is certain. 
Come in another chamber and take some wine, and break 
your fast. There will be many things here that you never 
saw or tasted.” 

She shook her head. 

“ The thought is good of you,” she said, more gently 
than she had before spoken. “ But I never took a crust 
out of charity, and I will not begin.” 


FOLLE-FARINE, 


367 


“ Charity I Do you call an invitation a charity 

“ When the rich ask the poor — yes.” 

He looked in her eyes with a smile. 

“ But when a man, old and ugly, asks a woman that is 
young and beautiful, on which side lies the charity then ?” 

“ I do not favor fine phrases,” she answered curtly, 
returning his look with a steady indifference. 

“ You are hard to please in anything, it would seem. 
Well, come hither, a moment at least.” 

She hesitated ; then, thinking to herself that to refuse 
would seem like fear, she followed him through several 
chambers into one where his own mid-day breakfast was 
set forth. 

She moved through all the magnificence of the place 
with fearless steps, and meditative glances, and a grave 
measured easy grace, as tranquil and as unimpressed as 
though she walked through the tall ranks of the seeding 
grasses on a meadow slope. 

It was all full of the color, the brilliancy, the choice 
adornment, the unnumbered treasures, and the familiar 
luxuries of a great noble’s residence ; but such things as 
these had no awe for her. 

The mere splendors of wealth, the mere accumulations 
of luxury, could not impress her for an instant; she 
passed through them indifferent and undaunted, thinking 
to herself, “However they may gild their roofs, the roofs 
shut out the sky no less.” 

Only, as she passed by some dream of a great poet 
cast in the visible shape of sculpture or of painting, did 
her glance grow reverent and humid ; only when she 
.recognized amidst the marble forms, or the pictured sto- 
ries, some one of those dear gods in whom she had a faith 
as pure and true as ever stirred in the heart of an Ionian 
child, did she falter and pause a little to gaze there with 
a tender homage in her eyes. 

The old man watched her with a musing studious 
glance from time to time. 

“ Let me tempt you,” he said to her when they reached 
the breakfast-chamber. “ Sit down with me and eat and 
drink. No ? Taste these sweetmeats at the least. To 
refuse to break bread with me is churlish.” 


3G8 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


“ I never owed any man a crust, and I will not begin 
now,’’ she answered obstinately, indifferent to the blaze 
of gold and silver before her, to the rare fruits and flowers, 
to the wines in their quaint flagons, to the numerous at- 
tendants who waited motionless around her. 

She was sharply hungered, and her throat was parched 
with the heat and the dust, and the sweet unwonted 
odors of the wines and the fruits assailed all her senses ; 
but he besought her in vain. 

She poured herself out some water into a goblet of 
ruby glass, rimmed with a band of pearls, and drank it, 
and set down the cup as indifferently as though she had 
drunk from the old wooden bowl chained among the ivy 
to the well in the mill-yard. 

“ Your denial is very churlish,” he said, after many a 
honeyed entreaty, which had met with no other answer 
from her. “ How shall you bind me to keep bond with 
you, and rescue your Northern Regner from his cave of 
snakes, unless you break bread with me, and so compel 
my faith ?” 

She looked at him from under the dusky cloud of her 
hair, with the golden threads gleaming on it like sunrays 
through darkness. 

“ A word that needs compelling,” she answered him 
curtly, “is broken by the heart before the lips give it. 
It is to plant a tree without a root, to put faith in a man 
that needs a bond.” 

He watched her with keen humorous eyes of amuse- 
ment. 

“ Where have you got all your wisdom?” he asked. 

“ It is not wisdom ; it is truth.” 

“ And truth is not wisdom ? You would seem to know 
the world well.” 

She laughed a little short laugh, whilst her face clouded. 

“ I know it not at all. But I will tell you what I have 
seen.” 

“ And that is ” 

^ “ I have seen a great toadstool spring up all in one 
night, after rain, so big, and so white, and so smooth, 
and so round, — and I knew its birth was so quick, and 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


869 


its growth was so strong, because it was a false thing 
that would poison all that should eat of it.” 

“Well?” 

“Well — when men speak overquick and overfair, 
what is that but the toadstool that springs from their 
breath ?” 

“ Who taught you so much suspicion ?” 

Her face darkened in anger. 

“ Suspicion ? That is a thing that steals in the dark 
and is afraid. I am afraid of nothing.” 

“ So it would seem.” 

He mused a moment whether he should offer her back 
her sequins as a gift ; he thought not. He divined aright 
that she had only sold them because she had innocently 
believed in the fullness of their value. He tried to tempt 
her otherwise. 

She was young ; she had a beautiful face, and a form 
like an Atalanta. She wore a scarlet sash girt to her 
loins, and seemed to care for color and for grace. There 
was about her a dauntless and imperious freedom. She 
could not be indifferent to all those powers which she 
besought with such passion for another. 

He had various treasures shown to her, — treasures of 
jewels, of gold and silver, of fine workmanship, of woven 
stuffs delicate and gorgeous as the wing of a butterfly. 
She looked at them tranquilly, as though her eyes had 
rested on such things all her days. 

“ They are beautiful, no doubt,” she said simply. “ But 
I marvel that you — being a man — care for such things as 
these.” 

“ Nay ; I care to give them to beautiful women, when 
such come to me, — as one has come to-day. Do me 
one trifling grace ; choose some one thing at least out of 
these to keep in remembrance of me.” 

Her eyes burned ia anger. 

“ If 1 think your bread would soil my lips, is it likely 
I should think to touch your treasure with my hands and 
have them still clean ?” 

“ You are very perverse,” he said, relinquishing hia 
efforts with regret. 

He knew how to wait for a netted fruit to ripen under 


3t0 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


the rays of temptation: gold was a forcing-heat — slow, 
but sure. 

She watched him with musing eyes that had a gleam 
of scorn in them, and yet a vague apprehension. 

“ Are you the Red Mouse she said suddenly. 

He looked at her surprised, and for thje moment per- 
plexed ; then he laughed — his little low cynical laugh. 

“ What makes you hink that?” 

“ I do not know. You look like it — that is all. He has 
made one sketch of me as I shall be when I am dead ; 
and the Red Mouse sits on my chest, and it is glad. You 
see that, by its glance. I never asked him what he meant 
by it. Some evil, 1 think ; and you look like it. You 
have the same triumph in your eye.” 

He laughed again, not displeased, as she had thought 
that he would be. 

“ He has painted you so ? I must see that. But be- 
lieve me, Folle-Farine, I shall wish for my triumph before 
your beauty is dead — if I am indeed the Red Mouse.” 

She shrunk a little with an unconscious and uncon- 
trollable gesture of aversion. 

“ I must go,” she said abruptly. “ The mules wait. 
Remember him, and I will remember you.” 

He smiled. 

“Wait; have you thought what a golden key for him 
will do for you when it unlocks your eagle’s cage and 
unbinds his wings?” 

“ What ?” 

She did not understand ; when she had come on this 
eager errand, no memory of her own fate had retarded or 
hastened her footsteps. 

“ Well, you look to take the same flight to the same 
heights, I suppose ?” 

“I?” 

“ Yes, you. You must know you are beautiful. You 
must know so much ?” 

A proud light laughed like sunshine over all her face. 

“ Ah, yes 1” she said, with a low, glad breath, and the 
blaze of a superb triumph in her eyes. “ He has painted 
me in a thousand ways. I shall live as the rose lives, on 
his canvas — a thing of a day that he can make immortal 1” 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


sn 


The keen elfin eyes of the old man sparkled with a 
malign mirth ; he had found what he wanted — as he 
thought. 

“And so, if this dust of oblivion blots out bis canvas 
forever from the world’s sight, your beauty will be blotted 
with it? I see. Well, I can understand how eager you 
are to have your eagle fly free. The fame of the Farnarina 
stands only second to the fame of Cleopatra.” 

“ Farnarina ? What is that ?” 

“ Farnarina ? One who, like you, gave the day’s life of 
a rose, and who got eternal life for it, — as you think to 
do.” 

She started a little, and a tremulous pain passed over 
the dauntless brilliance of her face and stole its color for 
awhile. 

“ I ?’^ she murmured. “ Ah, what does it matter for 
me? If there be just a little place — anywhere — wherever 
my life can live with his on the canvas, so that men say 
once now and then, in all the centuries, to each other, ‘ See, 
it is true — he thought her worthy of that, though she was 
less than a grain of dust under the hollow of his foot,’ it 
will be enough for me — more than enough.” 

The old man was silent; watching her, the mockery 
had faded from his eyes ; they were surprised and con- 
templative. 

She stood with her head drooped, with her face pale, 
an infinite yearning and resignation stole into the place 
of the exultant triumph which had blazed there like the 
light of the morning a moment earlier. 

She bad lost all remembrance of time and place ; the 
words died softly, as in a sigh of love, upon her lips. 

He waited awhile ; then he spoke : 

“But, if you were sure that, even thus much would be 
denied to you ; if you were sure that, in casting your 
eagle loose on the wind, you would lose him forever in 
the heights of a heaven you would never enter yourself; 
if you were sure that he would never give you one thought, 
one wish, one memory, but leave every trace of your 
beauty to perish as fast as the damp could rot or the 
worm could gnaw it; if you were sure that his immortal- 
ity would be your annihilation, say, would you still bid 


3t2 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


me turn a gold key in the lock of his cage, and release 
him 

She roused herself slowly from her reverie, and gazed 
at him with a smile he could not fathom ; it was so far 
away from him, so full of memory, so pitiful of his doubt. 

She was thinking of the night when she had found a 
man dying, and had bought his life back for him, with 
her own, from the gods. For the pact was sacred to her, 
and the old wild faith to her was still a truth. 

But of it her lips never spoke. 

‘‘ What is that to you she said, briefly. “ If you 
turn the key, you will see. It was not of myself that I 
came here to speak. Give him liberty, and I will give 
you gratitude. Farewell.’^ 

Before he had perceived what she was about to do, 
she had left his side, and had vanished through one of the 
doors which stood open, on to the gardens without. 

He sent his people to search for her on the terraces and 
lawns, but vainly ; she was fleeter than they, and had 
gone through the green glades in the sunlight as fast as 
a doe flies down the glades of her native forest. 

The old man sat silent. 


CHAPTER II. 

When she had outrun her strength for the moment, 
and was forced to slacken her speed, she paused to take 
breath on the edge of the wooded lands. 

She looked neither to right nor left ; on her backward 
flight the waters had no song, the marble forms no charm, 
the wonder-flowers no magic for her as she went; she 
had no ear for the melodies of the birds, no sight for the 
paradise of the rose-hung ways ; she had only one thought 
left — the gold that she had gained. 

The criielty of his remarks had stabbed her with each 
of their slow keen words as with a knife ; the sickness of 
a mortal terror had touched her for the instant, as she had 
remembered that it might be her fate to be not even so 


FOLLE-FARINE, 


373 


much as a memory in the life which she had saved from 
the grave. But with the first breath of the outer air the 
feebleness passed. The strength of the passion that pos- 
sessed her was too pure to leave her long a prey to any 
thought of her own fate. 

She smiled again as she looked up through the leaves 
at the noonday sun. 

“ What will it matter how or when the gods take my 
life, so only they keep their faith and give me his she 
thought. 

And her step was firm and free, and her glance cloud- 
less, and her heart content, as she went on her homeward 
path through the heat of the day. 

She was so young, she was so ignorant, she was still 
so astray in the human world about her, that she thought 
she held a talisman in those nine gold pieces. 

“A little gold,” be had said; and here she had it — 
honest, clean, worthy of his touch and usage. 

Her heart leaped to the glad and bounding music of 
early youth ; youth which does not reason, which only 
believes, and which sees the golden haze of its own faiths, 
and thinks them the promise of the future, as young chil- 
dren see the golden haze of their own hair and think it the 
shade of angels above their heads. 

When she at length reached the mill-house the sun had 
sunk ; she had been sixteen hours on foot, taking nothing 
all the while but a roll of rye bread that she had carried 
in her pouch, and a few water-cresses that she had gath- 
ered in a little brook when the mules had paused to drink 
there. 

Yet when she had housed the grain, turned the tired 
animals into their own nook of meadow to graze and rest 
for the night, she entered the house neither for repose nor 
food, but flew olT again through the dusk of the falling 
night. 

She had no remembrance of hunger, nor thirst, nor 
fatigue; she had only a buoyant sense of an ecstatic joy; 
she felt as though she had wings, and clove the air with 
no more effort than the belated starling which flew by 
her over the fields. 

“A little gold,” he had said; and in her bosom, wrapped 

32 


374 


FOLLE-FAEINE. 


in a green chestnut leaf, were there not the little, broad, 
round, glittering pieces which in the world of men seemed 
to have power to gain all love, all honor, all peace, and all 
fealty ? 

“ Phratos would have wished his gift to go so,” she 
thought to herself, with a swift, penitent, remorseful 
memory. 

For a moment she paused and took them once more 
out of their hiding-place, and undid the green leaf that 
enwrapped them, and kissed them and laughed, the hot 
tears falling down her cheeks, where she stood alone 
in the fields amid the honey-smell of the clover in the 
grass, and the fruit-fragrance of the orchards all about 
her in the dimness. 

“ A little gold ! — a little gold I” she murmured, and 
she laughed aloud in her great joy, and blessed the gods 
that they had given her to hear the voice of his desire. 

“ A little gold,” he had said, only ; and here she had 
so much 1 

No sorcerer, she thought, ever had power wider than 
this wealth bestowed on her. She did not know ; she 
had no measurement. Flamma’s eyes she had seen 
glisten over a tithe of such a sum as over the riches of 
an emperor’s treasury. 

She slipped them in her breast again and ran on, past 
the reeds silvering in the rising moon, past the waters 
quiet on a windless air, past the dark Christ who would 
not look, — who had never looked, or she had loved him 
with her earliest love, even as for his pity she loved 
Thanatos. 

Breathless and noiseless she severed the reeds with her 
swift feet, and lightly as a swallow on the wing passed 
through the dreary portals into Arslan’s chamber.. 

Ilis lamp was lighted. 

He stood before the cartoon of the Barabbas, touching 
it here and there with his charcoal, adding those latest 
thoughts, those after-graces, with which the artist de- 
lights to caress his picture, with a hand as soft and as 
lingering as the hand with which a mother caresses the 
yellow sunshine of her first-born’s curls. 

His face as he stood was very pale, passionless, weary, 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


3Y5 


with a sadness sardonic and full of scorn for himself on 
his mouth, and in his eyes those dreams which went so 
far — so far — into worlds whose glories his hand could 
portray for no human sight. 

He was thinking, as he worked, of the Barahbas. 

“You must rot,” he thought. “You will feed the rat 
and the mouse ; the squirrel will come and gnaw you to 
line his nest; and the beetle and the fly will take you for 
a spawning-bed. You will serve no other end — since you 
are mine. And yet I am so great a fool that I love you, 
and try to bring you closer and closer to the thing I see, 
and which you are not, and never can be. For what 
man lives so happy as to see the Canaan of his ideals, — 
save as Moses saw it from afar off, only to raise his arms 
to it vainly, and die 

There came a soft shiver of the air, as though it were 
severed by some eager bird. 

She came and stood beside him, a flash like the sunrise 
on her face, a radiance in her eyes, more lustrous than 
any smile ; her body tremulous and breathless from the 
impatient speed with which her footsteps had been 
winged ; about her all the dew and fragrance of the 
night. 

“ Here is the gold I” she cried. 

Her voice was eager and broken with its too great haste. 

“Gold?” 

He turned and looked at her, ignorant of her meaning, 
astonished at her sudden presence there. 

“ Here is the gold !” she murmured, her voice rising 
swift and clear, and full of the music of triumph with 
which her heart was thrilling. “ ‘A little gold,’ you said, 
you remember ? — ‘ only a little.’ And this is much. Take 
it — take it I Do you not hear ?” 

“ Gold ?” he echoed again, shaken from his trance of 
thought, and comprehending nothing and remembering 
nothing of the words that he had spoken in his solitude. 

“ Yes ! It is mine,” she said, her voice broken in its 
tumult of ecstasy — “it is mine — all mine. It is no 
charity, no gift to me. The chain was worth it, and I 
would only take what it was worth. A little gold, you 


3Y6 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


said ; q,nd now you can make the Barabbas live forever 
upon canvas, and compel men to say that it is great.’' 

As the impetuous, tremulous words broke from her, 
she drew the green leaf with the coins in it from her 
bosom, and thrust it into his hand, eager, exultant, 
laughing, weeping, all the silence and the control of her 
nature swept away in the flood of this immeasurable joy 
possessing her. 

The touch of the glittering pieces against his hands 
stung him to comprehension ; his face flushed over all 
its pallor ; he thrust it away with a gesture of abhorrence 
and rejection. 

“ Money I” he muttered. ** What money ? — yours ?” 

“ Yes, mine entirely ; mine indeed I” she answered, 
with a sweet, glad ring of victory in her rejoicing voice. 
“ It is true, quite true. They were the chains of se- 
quins that Phratos gave me when I used to dance to his 
music in the mountains ; and I have sold them. ‘ A little 
gold,’ you said; ‘and the Barabbas can live forever.’ 
Why do you look so ? It is all mine ; all yours ” 

In the last words her voice lost all its proud exultation, 
and sank low, with a dull startled wonder in it. 

Why did he look so ? 

His gesture of refusal she had not noticed. But the 
language his glance spoke was one plain to her. It 
terrified her, amazed her, struck her chill and dumb. 

In it there were disgust, anger, loathing, — even horror ; 
and yet there was in it also an unwonted softness, which 
in a woman’s would have shown itself by a rush of sud- 
den tears. 

“What do you think that I have done?” she mur- 
mured under her breath. “ The gold is mine — mine 
honestly. I have not stolen it, nor begged it. I got it 
as I say. Why will you not take it ? Why do you look 
at me so?” 

“ I ? Your money ? God in heaven I what can you 
think me ?” 

She grew white to the lips, all the impetuous, radiant 
tumult of her innocent rapture frozen into terror. 

“ I have done nothing wrong,” she murmured with a 
piteous wistfulness and wonder — “nothing wrong, in- 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


3n 


deed ; there is no shame in it. Will you not take it — 
for their sake 

He turned on her with severity almost savage; 

“It is impossible! Good God 1 Was I not low 
enough already ? How dared you think a thing so vile 
of me ? Have I ever asked pity of any living soul 

His voice was choked in his throat ; he was wounded 
to the heart. 

He had no thought that he was cruel ; he had no in- 
tent to terrify or hurt her ; but the sting of this last and 
lowest humiliation was so horrible to all the pride of his 
manhood, and so bitterly reminded him of his own ab- 
ject poverty ; and with all this there was an emotion in 
him that he had difficulty to control — being touched by 
her ignorance and by her gift as few things in his life had 
ever touched him. 

She stood before him trembling, wondering, sorely 
afraid ; all the light had died out of her face ; she was 
very pale, and her eyes dilated strangely. 

For some moments there was silence between them. 

“You will not take it?’’ she said at last, in a hushed, 
fearful voice, like that of one who speaks in the sight of 
some dead thing which makes all quiet around it. 

“ Take it !” he echoed. “ I could sooner kill a man out 
yonder and rob him. Can you not understand ? Greater 
shame could never come to me. You do not know what 
you would do. There may be beasts that fall as low, no 
doubt, but they are curs too base for hanging. Have I 
frightened you ? I did not mean to frighten you. You 
mean well and nobly, no doubt — no doubt. You do not 
know what you would do. Gifts of gold from man to 
man are bitter, and sap the strength of the receiver ; but 
from woman to man they are — to the man shameful. Can 
you not understand ?” 

Her face burned duskily ; she moved with a troubled, 
confused effort to get away from his gaze. 

“No,” she said in her shut teeth. “I do not know 
what you mean. Flamma takes all the gold I make. 
Why not you, if it be gold that is honest?” 

“ Flamma is your grandsire — your keeper — your mas- 
ter. He has a right to do as he chooses. He gives you 
32* 


3Y8 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


food and shelter, and in return he takes the gains of your 
labor. But 1, — what have I ever given you ? I am a 
stranger to you, and should have no claim on you, if I 
could be base enough to seek one. I am hideously poor. 
I make no disguise with you, — you know too well how I 
live. But can you not see ? — if I were mean enough to 
take the worth of a crust from you, I should be no more 
worthy of the very name of man. It is for the man to 
give to the woman. You see 

She heard him in silence, her face still dark with the 
confused pain on it of one who has fallen or been strucli 
upon the head, and half forgets and half remembers. 

“ I do not see,” she muttered. “ Whoever has, gives : 
what does it matter ? The folly in me was its littleness : 
it could not be of use. But it was all I had.” 

“ Little or great, — the riches of empires, or a beggar’s 
dole, — there could be no difference in the infamy to me. 
Have I seemed to you a creature so vile or weak that 
you could have a title to put such shame upon me ?” 

Out of the bitter passion of his soul, words more cruel 
than he had consciousness of rose to his lips and leaped 
to speech, and stung her as scorpions sting. 

She said nothing ; her teeth clinched, her face changed 
as it had used to do when Flamma had beaten her. 

She said nothing, but turned away ; and with one twist 
of her hand she flung the pieces through the open case- 
ment into the river that flowed below. 

They sank with a little shiver of the severed water. 

He caught her wrist a second too late. 

“ What madness 1 What have you done ? You throw 
your gold away to the river-swamp for me, when I have 
not a shred worth a copper-piece to pay you back in their 
stead I I did not mean to hurt you ; it was only the 
truth, — you could not have shamed me more. You bring 
on me an indignity that I can neither requite nor revenge. 
You have no right to load me with debts that I cannot 
pay — with gifts that I would die sooner than receive. 
But, then, how should you know ? — how should you 
know? If I wounded you with sharp words, I did 
wrong.” 

There was a softness that was almost tenderness in his 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


379 


voice as he spoke the last phrases in his self-reproach ; 
but her face did not change, her eyes did not lose their 
startled horror ; she put her hand to her throat as though 
she choked. 

“You cannot do wrong — to me,” she muttered, true, 
even in such a moment, to the absolute adoration which 
possessed her. 

Then, ere he could stay her, she turned, without an- 
other word, and fled out from his presence into the dusk 
of the night. 

The rushes in the moonlight sighed where they grew 
by the waterside above the sands where the gold had 
sunk. 

A thing more precious than gold was dead ; and only 
the reeds mourned for it. A thing of the river as they 
were, born like them from the dust, from the flood, and 
the wind, and the foam ; a thing that a god might desire, 
a thing that a breeze might break. 


CHAPTER III. 

The day broke tranquilly. There was a rosy light over 
all the earth. In the cornlands a few belated sheaves 
stood alone on the reaping ground, while children sought 
stray ears that might still be left among the wild flowers 
and the stubble. The smell of millions of ripening autumn 
fruits filled the air from the orchards. The women going 
to their labor in the fields, gave each other a quiet good- 
day ; whilst their infants pulled down the blackberry 
branches in the lanes or bowled the early apples down 
the roads. Great clusters of black grapes were ready 
mellowed on the vines that clambered over cabin roof 
and farmhouse chimney. The chimes of the Angelus 
sounded softly from many a little steeple bosomed in the 
rolling woods. 

An old man going to bis work, passed by a girl lying 
asleep in a hollow of the ground, beneath a great tree of 


380 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


elder, black with berries. She was lying with her face 
turned upward ; her arms above her head ; her eyelids 
were wet ; her mouth smiled with a dreamy tenderness ; 
her lips murmured a little inaudibly ; her bosom heaved 
with fast uneven palpitating breaths. 

It was sunrise. In the elder thicket little chaffinches 
were singing, and a missel-thrush gave late in the year 
a song of the April weather. The east was radiant with 
the promise of a fair day, in which summer and autumn 
should be wedded with gorgeous pomp of color, and 
joyous chorus of the birds. The old man roughly thrust 
against her breast the heavy wooden shoe on his right 
foot. 

“ Get up he muttered. “ Is it for the like of you to 
lie and sleep at day-dawn ? Get up, or your breath will 
poison the grasses that the cattle feed on, and they will 
die of an elf-shot, surely.” 

She raised her head from where it rested on her out- 
stretched arms, and looked him in the eyes and smiled un- 
consciously ; then glanced around and rose and dragged 
her steps away, in the passive mechanical obedience be- 
gotten by long slavery. 

There was a shiver in her limbs ; a hunted terror in 
her eyes; she had wandered sleepless all night long. 

“ Beast,” muttered the old man, trudging on with a 
backward glance at her. “You have been at a witches^ 
sabbath, I dare be bound. We shall have fine sickness 
in the styes and byres. I wonder would a silver bullet 
hurt you, as the fables say ? If I were sure it would, I 
would not mind having my old silver flagon melted down, 
though it is the only thing worth a rush in the house.” 

She went on through the long wet rank grass, not 
hearing his threats against her. She drew her steps 
slowly and lifelessly through the heavy dews ; her head 
was sunk ; her lips moved audibly, and murmured as she 
went, “ A little gold 1 a little gold I” 

“ Maybe some one has shot her this very day-dawn,” 
thought the peasant, shouldering his axe as he went 
down into the little wood to cut ash-sticks for the mar- 
ket. “ She looks half dead already ; and they say the 
devil-begotten never bleed.” 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


381 


The old man guessed aright. She had received her 
mortal wound ; though it was one bloodless and tearless, 
and for which no moan was made, lest any should blame 
the slayer. 

The sense of some great guilt was on her, as she stole 
through the rosy warmth of the early morning. 

She had thought to take him liberty, honor, strength, 
and dominion among his fellows — and he had told her 
that she had dealt him the foulest shame that his life had 
ever known. 

“ What right have you to burden me with debt un- 
asked he had cried out against her in the bitterness of 
his soul. And she knew that, unasked, she had laid on 
him the debt of life. 

If ever he should know 

She had wandered on and on, aimlessly, not knowing 
what she did all the night through, hearing no other sound 
but the fierce hard scathing scorn of his reproaches. 

lie had told her she was in act so criminal, and yet she 
knew herself in intent so blameless ; she felt like those of 
whom she had heard in the old Hellenic stories, who had 
been doomed by fate, guiltless themselves, to work some 
direful guilt which had to be wrought out to its bitter end, 
the innocent yet the accursed instrument of destiny, even 
as Adrastus upon Atys. 

On and on, through the watery moonlight she had fled, 
when she left the water-tower that night ; down the slope 
of the fields ; the late blossoms of the poppies, and the 
feathery haze of the ripened grasses tossed in waves from 
right to left ; the long shadows of the clouds upon the 
earth, chasing her like the specter hosts of the Aaskarreya 
of his Scandinavian skies. 

She had dropped at last like a dying thing, broken and 
breathless, on the ground. There she crouched, and hid 
her face upon her hands ; the scorch of an intolerable 
shame burned on it. 

She did not know what ailed her ; what consumed her 
with abhorrence of herself. She longed for the earth to 
yawn and cover her ; for the lilies asleep in the pool, to 
unclose and take her amidst them. Every shiver of a 
leaf, under a night-bird’s passage, every motion of the 


882 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


water, as the willow branches swept it, made her start 
and shiver as though some great guilt was on her soul. 

Not a breath of wind was stirring, not a sound dis- 
turbed the serenity of the early night ; she heard no voice 
but the plaintive cry of the cushat. She saw “ no snakes 
but the keen stars,” which looked on her cold and lu- 
minous, and indifferent to human woes as the eyes of 
Arslkn. 

Yet she was afraid ; afraid with a trembling horror of 
herself; she who had once never known one pulse of fear, 
and who had smiled in the eyes of death as children in 
their mother’s. 

The thrill of a new-born, inexplicable, cruel consciousness 
stole like fire through her. She knew now that she loved 
him with that strange mystery of human love which had 
been forever to her until now a thing apart from her, de- 
nied to her, half scorned, half yearned for ; viewed from 
afar with derision, yet with desire, as a thing at once be- 
neath her and beyond her. 

All the light died ; the moon rose ; the white lilies 
shivered in its pallid rays ; the night-birds went by on 
the wind. She never stirred ; the passionate warmth of 
her frame changed to a deadly cold ; her face was buried 
in her hands ; ever and again she shivered, and glanced 
round, as the sound of a hare’s step, or the rustle of a 
bough by a squirrel, broke the silence. 

The calm night-world around her, the silvery seas of 
reeds, the dusky woods, the moon in its ring of golden 
vapor, the flickering foliage, the gleam of the glowworm 
in the dew, all the familiar things amidst which her feet 
had wandered for twelve summers in the daily measure 
of those beaten tracks; all these seemed suddenly strange 
to her — mysterious, unreal. 

She longed for the day to dawn again, though day was 
but an hour dead. And yet she felt that at the first break 
of light she must flee and hide from his and every eye. 

She had meant to give him honor and he had upbraided 
her gift as shame. 

The bitterness, the cruelty, the passion of bis re- 
proaches stung her with their poison, as, in her vision 
of the reed, she had seen the barbed tongues of a thousand 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


383 


snakes striking through and through the frail, despised, 
blossomless slave of the .wind. 

She had thought that as the god to the reed, so might 
he to her say hereafter, “You are the lowliest and least 
of all the chance-born things of the sands and the air, and 
yet through you has an immortal music arisen,” — and for 
the insanity of her thought he had cursed her. 

Towards dawn, where she had sunk down in the moss, 
and in the thickets of elder and thorn — where she had 
made her bed in her childhood many a summer night, 
when she had been turned out from the doors of the mill- 
house ; — there for a little while a fitful exhausted sleep 
came to her; the intense exhaustion of bodily fatigue 
overcoming and drugging to slumber the fever and the 
wakefulness of the mind. The thrush came out of the 
thorn, while it was still quite dark, and the morning stars 
throbbed in the skies, and sang-his day-song close about 
her head. 

In her sleep she smiled. For Oneirus was merciful; 
and she dreamed that she slept folded close in the arms 
of Arslan, and in her dreams she felt the kisses of his 
lips rain fast on hers. 

Then the old peasant trudging to his labor in the ob- 
scurity of the early day saw her, and struck at her with 
- his foot and woke her roughly, and muttered, “ Get thee 
/ up : is it such beggars as thee that should be abed when 
the sun breaks?” 

She opened her eyes, and smiled on him uncon- 
sciously, as she had smiled in her brief oblivion. The 
j)assion of her dreams was still about her ; her mouth 
burned, her limbs trembled ; the air seemed to her filled 
with music, like the sound of the mavis singing in the 
thorn. 

Then she remembered ; and shuddered ; and arose, 
knowing the sweet mad dream, which had cheated her, a 
lie. For she awoke alone. 

She did not heed the old man’s words, she did not feel 
his hurt; yet she obeyed him, and left the place, and 
dragged herself feebly towards Yprbs by the sheer un- 
conscious working of that instinct born of habit which 
takes the ox or the ass back undriven through the old 


384 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


accustomed ways to stand beside their plowshare or their 
harness faithfully and unbidden. 

Where the stream ran by the old mill-steps the river- 
reeds were blowing in the wind, with the sunrays play- 
ing in their midst, and the silver wings of the swallows 
brushing them with a sweet caress. 

“ I thought to be the reed chosen by the gods she 
said bitterly in her heart, “ but I am not worthy — even 
to die.’’ 

For she would have asked of fate no nobler thing than 
this — to be cut down as the reed by the reaper, if so be 
that through her the world might be brought to hearken 
to the music of the lips that she loved. 

She drew her aching weary limbs feebly through the 
leafy ways of the old mill-garden. The first leaves of 
autumn* fluttered down upon her head ; the last scarlet 
of the roses flashed in her path as she went ; the wine- 
like odors of the fruits were all about her on the air. It 
was then fully day. The sun was up ; the bells rang the 
sixth hour far away from the high towers and spires of 
the town. 

At the mill-house, and in the mill-yard, where usually 
every one had arisen and were hard at labor whilst the 
dawn was dark, everything was still. There was no 
sign of work. The light blazed on the panes of the case- 
ments under the eaves, but its summons failed to arouse 
the sleepers under the roof. 

The bees hummed around their houses of straw ; 
the pigeons flew to and fro between the timbers of 
the walls, and the boughs of the fruit trees. The mule 
leaned his head over the bar of the gate, and watched 
with wistful eyes. The cow in her shed lowed, im- 
patient for some human hands to unbar her door, and 
lead her forth to her green-clovered pasture. A dumb 
boy, who aided in the working of the mill, sat astride of 
a log of timber, kicking his feet among the long grasses, 
and blowing thistle down above his head upon the 
breeze. 

The silence and the inactivity startled her into a sense 
of them, as no noise or movement, curses or blows, could 
have done. She looked around stupidly j the window- 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


385 


shutters of the house-windows were closed, as though it 
were still night. 

She signed rapidly to the dumb boy. 

“ What has happened ? Why is the mill not at work 
thus late 

•The boy left off blowing the thistle feathers on the 
wind, and grinned, and answered on his hands, “Flamma 
is almost dead, they say.” 

And he grinned again, and laughed, as far as his un- 
couth and guttural noises could be said to approach the 
triumph and the jubilance of laughter. 

She stared at him blankly for awhile, bewildered and 
shaken from the stupor of her own misery. She had never 
thought of death and her t3U’ant in unison. 

lie had seemed a man formed to live on and on and on 
unchanging for generations; he was so hard, so unyield- 
ing, so hale, so silent, so callous to all pain ; it had ever 
seemed to her — and to the country round — that death 
itself would never venture to come to wrestle with him. 
She stood among the red and the purple and the russet 
gold of the latest summer flowers in the mill-garden, where 
he had scourged her as a little child for daring to pause 
and cool her burning face in the sweetness of the white 
lilies. Could that ruthless arm be unnerved even by age 
or death ? — it seemed to her impossible. 

All was quite still. Nothing stirred, except the silvery 
gnats of the morning, and the bees, and the birds in the 
leaves. There seemed a strange silence everywhere, and 
the great wheels stood still in the mill-water ; never within 
the memory of any in that countryside had those wheels 
failed to turn at sunrise, unless locked by a winter-frost. 

She hastened her steps, and went within. The clock 
ticked, the lean cat mewed ; other sound there was none. 
She left her wooden shoes at the bottom step, and stole 
up the steep stairs. The woman Pitchou peered with a 
scared face out from her master’s chamber. 

“ Where hast been all night ?” she whispered in her 
grating voice ; “thy grandsire lies a-dying.” 

‘‘Dying?” 

“Ay,” muttered the old peasant. “He had a stroke 
33 


386 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


yester-night as he came from the corn-fair. They brought 
him home in the cart. He is as good as dead. You are 
glad.^' 

“Hush muttered the girl fiercely; and she dropped 
down on the topmost step, and rested her head on her 
hands. She had nothing to grieve for ; and yet there was 
that in the coarse congratulation which jarred on her and 
hurt her. 

She thought of Manon Dax dead in the snow ; she 
thought of the song-birds dead in the traps ; she thought 
of the poor coming — coming — coming — through so many 
winters to beg bread, and going away with empty hands 
and burdened hearts, cursing God. Was this death-bed 
all their vengeance? It was but poor justice, and came 
late. 

Old Pitchou stood and looked at her. 

“Will he leave her the gold or no she questioned in 
herself ; musing whether or no it were better to be civil 
to the one who might inherit all his wealth, or might be 
cast adrift upon the world — who could say which ? 

After awhile Folle-Farine rose silently and brushed 
her aside, and went into the room. 

It was a poor chamber ; with a bed of straw and a rough 
bench or two, and a wooden cross with the picture of the 
Ascension hung above it. The square window was open, 
a knot of golden pear-leaves nodded to and fro ; a linnet 
sang. 

On the bed Claudis Flamma lay ; dead already, except 
for the twitching of his mouth, and the restless wanderings 
of his eyes. Yet not so lost to life but that he knew her 
at a glance ; and as she entered, glared upon her, and 
clinched his numbed hands upon the straw, and with a 
horrible effort in his almost lifeless limbs, raised the right 
arm, that alone had any strength or warmth left in it, and 
pointed at her with a shriek : 

“ She was a saint — a saint: God took her. So I said : 
— and was proud. While all the while man begot on her 
thatr 

Then with a ghastly rattle in his throat, he quivered, 
and lay paralyzed again: only the eyes were alive, and 
were still speaking — awfully. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


m 


Folle-Fiiriae went up to his bed, and stood beside it, 
looking down on him. 

“ You mean — my mother ?” 

It was the first time that she had ever said the word. 
Tier voice lingered on the word, as tliough loath to leave 
its unfamiliar sweetness. 

He lay and looked at her, motionless, impatient, life- 
less ; save only for the bleak and bloodshot stare of the 
stony eyes. 

She thought that he had heard ; but he made no sign 
in answer. 

She sank down on her knees beside his bed, and put 
her lips close to him. 

“ Try and speak to me of my mother — once — once,” 
she murmured, with a pathetic longing in her voice. 

A shudder shook his frozen limbs. He made no answer, 
he only glared on her with a terrible stare that might be 
horror, repentance, grief, memory, fear — she could not 
tell. 

Old Pitchou stretched her head from the corner, as a 
hooded snake from its hole. 

“ Ask where the money is hid,” she hissed in a 
shrill whisper. “Ask — ask — while he can yet under- 
stand.” 

He understood, for a smile grim and horrible disturbed 
his tight lips a moment. 

Folle-Farine did not hear. 

“ Tell me of my mother ; — tell me, tell me,” she mut- 
tered. Since a human love had been born in her heart, 
she had thought often of that mother whose eyes had 
never looked on her, and whose breast had never fed her. 

His face changed, but he did not speak ; he gasped for 
breath, and lay silent ; his eyes trembled and confused ; 
it might be that in that moment remorse was with him, 
and the vain regrets of cruel years. 

It might be that dying thus, he knew that from his 
hearth, as from hell, mother and child had both been 
driven whilst his lips had talked of Hod. 

A little bell rang softly in the orchard below the case- 
ment ; the clear voice of a young boy singing a canticle 
crossed the voice of the linnet; there was a gleam of sil- 


388 


FOLLE-FAUINE. 


ver iQ the sud. The Church bore its Host to the dying 
man. 

They turned her from the chamber. 

The eyes of one unsanctified might not gaze upon mys- 
teries of the blest. 

She went out without resistance ; she was oppressed 
and stupefied ; she went to the stairs, and there sat down 
again, resting her forehead on her hands. 

The door of the chamber was a little open, and she 
could hear the murmurs of the priest’s words, and smell 
the odors of the sacred chrism. A great bitterness came 
on her mouth. 

“ One crust in love — to them — in the deadly winters, 
had been better worth than all this oil and prayer,” she 
thought. And she could see nothing but the old fam- 
ished face of Manon Dax in the snow and the moonlight, 
as the old woman had muttered, “ God is good.” 

The officers of the Church ceased ; there reigned an 
intense stillness ; a stillness as of cold. 

Suddenly the voice of Claudis Flamma rang out loud 
and shrill, — 

“ I loved her I Oh, God ! — Thou knowest I” 

She rose and looked through the space of the open 
door into the death-chamber. 

He had sprung half erect, and with his arms out- 
stretched, gazed at the gladness and the brightness of 
the day. In his eyes there was a mortal agony, a pas- 
sion of reproach. 

With one last supreme effort, he raised the crucifix 
which the priests had laid upon his bare anointed breast, 
and held it aloft, and shook it, and spat on it, and cast it 
forth from him broken upon the ground. 

‘‘ Even Thou art a liar I” he cried, — it was the cry of the 
soul leaving the body, — with the next moment he fell 
back — dead. 

In that one cry his heart had spoken ; the cold, hard 
heart that yet had shut one great love and one great 
faith in it, and losing these, had broken and shown no 
wound. 

For what agony had been like unto his? 

Since who could render him back on earth, or in the 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


389 


grave, that pure white soul he had believed in once? 
Yea — who ? Not man ; not even God. 

Therefore had he suffered without hope. 

She went away from the house and down the stairs, 
and out into the ruddy noon. She took her wa}^ by in- 
stinct to the orchard, and there sat down upon a moss- 
grown stone within the shadow of the leaves. 

All sense was deadened in her under a deep unutterable 
pity. 

From where she sat she could see the wicket window, 
the- gabled end of the chamber, and where the linnet sang, 
and the yellow fruit of the pear-tree swung. All about 
was the drowsy hot weather of the fruit harvest ; the 
murmur of bees; the sweep of the boughs in the water. 

Never, in all the years that they had dwelt together 
beneath one roof, had any good word or fair glance been 
given her; he had nourished her on bitterness, and for 
his wage paid her a curse. Yet her heart was sore for 
him ; and judged him without hatred. 

All things seemed clear to her, now that a human love 
had reached her; and this man also, having loved greatly 
and been betrayed, became sanctified in her sight. 

She forgot his brutality, his avarice, his hatred ; she 
remembered only that he had loved, and in his love been 
fooled, and so had lost his faith in God and man, and had 
thus staggered wretchedly down the darkness of his life, 
hating himself and every other, and hurting every other 
human thing that touched him, and crying ever in his 
blindness, “ 0 Lord, I believe, help thou mine unbelief I’’ 

And now he was dead. 

What did it matter? 

Whether any soul of his lived again, or whether body 
and mind both died forever, what would it benefit all 
those whom he had slain ? — the little fair birds, poisoned 
in their song; the little sickly children, starved in the 
long winters ; the miserable women, hunted to their graves 
for some small debt of fuel or bread ; the wretched poor, 
mocked in their famine by his greed and gain ? 

It had been woe for him that his loved had wronged 
him, and turned the hard excellence of his life to stone : 
but none the less had it been woe to them to fall and 

33 * 


390 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


perish, because his hand would never spare, his heart 
would never soften. 

Her heart was sick with the cold, bitter, and inexorable 
law, which had let this man drag out his seventy years, 
cursing and being cursed ; and lose all things for a dream 
of God ; and then at the last, upon his death-bed, know 
that dream likewise to be false. 

“ It is so cruel ! It is so cruel 1” she muttered, where 
she sat with dry eyes in the shade of the leaves, looking 
at that window where death was. 

And she had reason. 

For there is nothing so cruel in life as a Faith; — the 
Faith, whatever its name may be, that draws a man on 
all his years through, on one narrow path, by one tremu- 
lous light, and then at the last, with a laugh, drowns 
him. 


CHAPTER IV. 

The summer day went by. No one sought her. She 
did not leave the precincts of the still mill-gardens ; a sort 
of secrecy and stillness seemed to bind her footsteps there, 
and she dreaded to venture forth, lest she should meet 
the eyes of Arslan. 

The notary had put seals upon all the cupboards and 
desks. Two hired watchers sat in the little darkened room 
above. Some tapers burned beside his bed. The great clock 
ticked heavily. All the house was closed. Without burned 
the great roses of the late summer, and the scorch of a cloud- 
less sun. The wheels of the mill stood still. People came 
and went; many women among them. The death of the 
miller of Ypres was a shock to all his countryside. There 
was scarce a face that did not lighten, as the peasants 
going home at the evening met one another in the mellow 
fields, and called across, “ Hast heard ? Flamma is dead 
— at last.” 

No woman came across the meadows with a little can- 
dle, and kneeled down by his body and wept and blessed 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


391 


the stiff and withered hands for the good that they had 
wrought, and for the gifts that they had given. 

The hot day-hours stole slowly by ; all was noiseless 
there where she sat, lost in the stupefied pain of her 
thoughts, in the deep shadow of the leaves, where the first 
breath of the autumn had gilded them and varied them, here 
and there, with streaks of red. 

No one saw her ; no one remembered her ; no one came 
to her. She was left in peace, such peace as is the lot of 
those for whose sigh no human ear is open, for whose need 
no human hand is stretched. Once indeed at noonday, the 
old serving-woman sought her, and had forced on her 
some simple meal of crusts and eggs. 

“For who can tell?” the shrewd old Norway crone 
thought to herself, — “who can tell ? She may get all the 
treasure : who knows ? And if so, it will be best to have 
been a little good to her this day, and to seem as if one 
had forgiven about the chain of coins.” 

For Fitchou, like the world at large, would pardon • 
offenses, if for pardon she saw a sure profit in gold. 

“ Who will he have left all the wealth to, think you ?” 
the old peasant muttered, with a cunning glitter in her 
sunken eyes, standing by her at noon, in the solitude, 
Avhere the orchards touched the mill-stream. 

“ The wealth,-!— whose wealth ?” Folle-Farine echoed 
the word stupidly. She had had no thought of the 
hoarded savings of that long life of theft, and of oppres- 
sion. She had had no remembrance of any possible inher- 
itance which might accrue to her by this sudden death. 
She had been too long his goaded and galled slave to be 
able to imagine herself his heir. 

“Ay, his wealth,” answered the woman, standing 
against the water with her wooden shoes deep in dock- 
leaves and grass, gazing, with a curious eager grasping 
greed in her eyes, at the creature whom she had always 
done her best to thwart, to hurt, to starve and to slander. 

“ Ay, his wealth. You who look so sharp after your 
bits of heathen coins, cannot for sure pretend to forget 
the value he must have laid by, living as he has lived all 
the days from his youth upward. There must be a rare 
mass of gold hid away somewhere or another — the notary 


392 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


knows, I suppose — it is all in the place, that I am sure, 
lie was too wise ever to trust money far from home; he 
knew well it was a gacl-about, that once you part with 
never comes back to you. It must be all in the secret 
places ; in the thatch, under the hearthstone, in the rafters, 
under the bricks. And, maybe, there will be quite a for- 
tune. He had so much, and he lived so near. Where 
think you it will go V 

A faint bitter smile flickered a moment over Folle- 
Farine’s mouth. 

“ It should go to the poor. It belongs to them. It 
was all coined out of their hearts and their bodies.’’ 

“ Then you have no hope for yourself : — you ?” 

“I?” 

She muttered the word dreamily ; and raised her ach- 
ing eyelids, and stared in stupefaction at the old, haggard, 
dark, ravenous face of Pitehou. 

“ Pshaw I You cannot cheat me that way,” said the 
woman, moving away through the orchard branches, 
muttering to herself. “As if a thing of hell like you 
ever served like a slave all these years, on any other 
hope than the hope of the gold I Well, — as for me, — I 
never pretend to lie in that fashion. If it had not been 
for the hope of a share in the gold, I would never have 
eaten for seventeen years the old wretch’s mouldy crusts 
and lentil-washings.” 

She hobbled, grumbling on her way back to the house, 
through the russet shadows and the glowing gold of the 
orchards. 

Folle-Farine sat by the water, musing on the future 
which had opened to her with the woman’s words of 
greed. 

Before another day had sped, it was possible, — so even 
said one who hated her, and begrudged her every bit and 
drop that she had taken at the miser’s board, — possible 
that she would enter into the heritage of all that this 
long life, spent in rapacious greed and gain, had gathered 
together. 

One night earlier, paradise itself would have seemed 
to open before her with such a hope ; for she would have 
hastened to the feet of Arslan, and there poured all treasure 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


393 


that chance might have given her, and would have cried 
out of the fullness of her heart, “ Take, enjoy, be free, do 
as you will. So that* you make the world of men own 
your greatness, I will live as a beggar all the years of 
my life, and think myself richer than kings I’’ 

But now, what use would it be, though she were called 
to an empire ? She would not dare to say to him, as a 
day earlier she would have said with her first breath, 
‘'All that is mine is thine,” 

She would not even dare to give him all and creep 
away unseen, unthanked, unhonored into obscurity and 
oblivion, for had he not said, “ You have no right to bur- 
den me with debt” ? 

Yet as she sat there lonely among the grasses, with 
the great mill-wheels at rest in the water, and the swal- 
lows skimming the surface that was freed from the churn 
and the foam of the wheels, as though the day of Flamma’s 
death had been a saint’s day, the fancy which had been 
set so suddenly before her, dazzled her, and her aching 
brain and her sick despair could not choose but play with 
it despite themselves. 

If the fortune of Flamma came to her, it might be 
possible, she thought, to spend it so as to release him 
from his bondage, without knowledge of his own ; so to 
fashion with^t a golden temple and a golden throne for 
the works of his hand, that the world, which as they all 
said worshiped gold, should be forced to gaze in homage 
on the creations' of his mind and hand. 

And yet he had said greater shame there could come 
to no man, than to rise by the aid of a woman. The 
apple of life, however sweet and fair in its color and 
savor, would be as poison in his mouth if her hand held 
it. That she knew, and in the humility of her great and 
reverent love, she submitted without question to its cruelty. 

At night she went within to break her fast, and try to 
rest a little. The old peasant woman served her silently, 
and for the first time willingly. “Who can say?” the 
Norman thought to herself, — “who can say? She may 
yet get it all, who knows ?” 

At night as she slept, Pitchou peered at her, shading 
the light from her eyes. 


394 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


“ If only I could know who gets the gold?” she mut- 
tered. Her sole thought was the money ; the money that 
the notary held under his lock and %eal. She wished now 
that she had dealt better with the girl sometimes ; it 
would have been safer, and it could have done no harm. 

With earliest dawn Folle-Farine fled again to the refuge 
of the wood. She shunned, with the terror of a hunted 
doe, the sight of people coming and going, the priests 
and the gossips, the sights and the sounds, and none 
sought her. 

A 11 the day through she wandered in the cool dewy 
orchard-ways. 

Beyond the walls of the foliage, she saw the shrouded 
window, the flash of the crucifix, the throngs of the 
mourners, the glisten of the white robes. She heard the 
deep sonorous swelling of the chants ; she saw the little 
procession come out from the doorway and cross the old 
wooden bridge, and go slowly through the sunlight of 
the meadows. Many of the people followed, singing, 
and bearing tapers ; for he who was dead had stood well 
with the Church, and from such there still issues for the 
living a fair savor. 

No one came to her. What had they to do with her, — 
a creature unbaptized, and an outcast ? 

She watched the little line fade away, over the green 
and 'golden glory of the fields. 

Slie did not think of herself — since Arslan had looked 
at her, in his merciless scorn, she had had neither past 
nor future. 

It did not even occur to her that her home would be 
in this place no longer; it was as natural to her as its 
burrow to the cony, its hole to the fox. It did not occur 
to her that the death of this her tyrant could not but 
make some sudden and startling change in all her ways 
and fortune. 

She waited in the woods all day; it was so strange a 
sense to her to be free of the bitter bondage that had lain 
on her life so long ; she could not at once arise and under- 
stand the meaning of her freedom ; she was like a captive 
soldier, who has dragged the cannon-ball so long, that 
when it is loosened from his limb, it feels strange, and his 
step sounds uncompanioned. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


395 


She was thankful, too, for the tortured beasts, and the 
hunted birds ; she fed tlieni and looked in their gentle 
eyes, and told them that they were free. But in her own 
heart one vain wish, only, ached — she thought always : 

“If only I might die for him, — as the reed for the 
god.” 

The people returned, and then after awhile all went 
forth again ; they and their priests with them. The 
place was left alone. The old solitude had come upon it ; 
the sound of the wood-dove only filled the quiet. 

The day grew on; in the orchards it was already twi- 
light, whilst on the waters and in the open lands farther 
away the sun was bright. There was a wicket close by 
under the boughs; a bridle-path ran by, moss-grown, and 
little used, but leading from the public road beyond. 

From the gleam of the twisted fruit trees a low flute- 
like noise came to her ear in the shadow of the solitude. 

“ Folle-Farine, — I go on your errand. If you repent, 
there is time yet to stay me. Say — do you bid me still 
set your Norse-god free from the Cave of the Snakes 

She, startled, looked up into the roofing of the thick 
foliage ; she saw shining on her with a quiet smile the 
eyes which she had likened to the eyes of the Red Mouse. 
They scanned her gravely and curiously : they noted the 
change in her since the last sun had set.. 

“ What did he say to you for your gold ?” the old man 
asked. 

She was silent; the blood of an intolerable shame 
burned in her face ; she had not thought that she had 
betrayed her motive in seeking a price for her chain of 
coins. 

He laughed a little softly. 

“ Ah I You fancied I did not know your design when 
you came so bravely to sell your Moorish dancing-gear. 
Oh, Folle-Farine ! — female things, with eyes like yours, 
must never hope to keep a secret !” 

She never answered ; she had risen and stood rooted 
to the ground, her head hung down, her breast heaving, 
the blood coming and going in her intolerable pain, as 
though she flushed and froze under a surgeon’s probe. 

“ What did he say to you ?” pursued her questioner. 


396 


FOLLE-FAUINE. 


“ There should be but one language possible from a man 
of his years to a woman of yours.’’ 

She lifted her eyes and spoke at last: 

“He said that I did him a foul shame : the gold lies in 
the sands of the river.” 

She was strong to speak the truth, inflexibly, to the, 
full ; for its degradation to herself she knew was honor 
to the absent. It showed him strong and cold and un- 
tempted, preferring famine and neglect and misery to any 
debt or burden of a service done. 

The old man, leaning on the wooden bar of the gate 
among the leaves, looked at her long and thoughtfully. 

“He would not take your poor little pieces? You 
mean that ?” 

She gave a sign of assent. 

“ That was a poor reward to you, Folle-Farine I” Her 
lips grew white and shut together. 

“Mine was the fault, the folly. He was right, no 
doubt.” 

“ You are very royal. I think your northern god was 
only thus cold because your gift was such a little one, 
Foile-Farine.” 

A strong light flashed on him from her eyes. 

“ It would have been the same if I had offered him an 
empire.” 

“ You are so sure ? Hoes he hate you, then — this god 
of yours ?” 

She quivered from head to foot; but her courage 
would not yield, her faith would not be turned. 

“ Need a man hate the dust under his foot?” she mut- 
tered in her teeth ; “ because it is a thing too lowly for 
him to think of as he walks.” 

“You are very truthful.” 

She was silent; standing there in the shadow of the 
great mill-timbers. 

The old man watched her with calm approving ej^es, 
as he might have watched a statue of bronze. He was 
a great man, a man of much wealth, of wide power, of 
boundless self-indulgence, of a keen serene wisdom, which 
made his passions docile and ministers to his pleasure, 
and never allowed them any mastery over himself. He 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


39T 


was studying >the shape of her limbs, the hues of her 
skin, the lofty slender stature of her, and the cloud of 
her hair that was like the golden gleaming mane of a 
young desert mare. 

“ All these in Paris,” he was thinking. “ Just as she is, 
with just the same bare feet and limbs, the same un- 
trammeled gait, the same flash of scarlet round her loins, 
only to the linen tunic a hem of gold, and on the breast 
a flame of opals. Paris would say that even I had never 
in my many years done better. The poor barbarian I 
she sells her little brazen sequins, and thinks them her 
only treasure, whilst she has all that I Is Arslan blind, 
or is he only tired ?” 

But he spake none of his thoughts aloud. He was too 
wary to scare the prey he meant to secure with any 
screams of the sped arrow, or any sight of the curled 
lasso. 

“Well,” he said, simply, “I understand; your eagle, 
in recompense for your endeavors to set him free, only 
tears your heart with his talons ? It is the way of 
eagles. He has wounded you sorely. And the wound 
will bleed many a day.” 

She lifted her head. 

“ Have I complained ? — have I asked your pity, or any 
man’s?” 

“Oh, no, you are very strong 1 So is a lioness; but 
she dies of a man’s wound sometimes. He has been 
very base to you.” 

“ He has done as he thought it right to do. Who 
shall lay blame on him for that ?” 

“ Your loyalty says so ; you are very brave, no doubt. 
But tell me, do you still wish this man, who wounds you 
so cruelly, set free?” 

“ Yes.” 

“What, still?” 

“Why not?” 

“ Why not ? Only this : that once he is let loose your 
very memory will be shaken from his thoughts as the dust 
of the summer, to which you liken yourself, is shaken from 
his feet !” 

“jNo doubt.” 


34 


393 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


She thought she did not let him see the agony he dealt 
her ; she stood unflinching, her hands crossed upon her 
breast, her head drooped, her eyes looking far from him 
to where the fading sunlight gleamed still upon the reaches 
of the river. 

“ No doubt,” he echoed. “ And yet I think you hardly 
understand. This man is a great artist. He has a great 
destiny, if he once can gain the eye and the ear of the 
world. The world will fear him, and curse him always ; 
he is very merciless to it; but if he once 'conquer fame, 
that fame will be one to last as long as the earth lasts. 
That I believe. Well, give this man what he longs for 
and strives for, a life in his fame which shall not die so 
long as men have breath to speak of art. What will you 
be in that great drunken dream of his, if once we make it 
true for him ? Not even a remembrance, Folle-Farine. 
For though you have fancied that you, by your beauty, 
would at least abide upon his canvas, and so go on to im- 
mortality with his works and name, you seem not to know 
that so much also will do any mime who lets herself for 
hire on a tavern stage, or any starveling who makes her 
daily bread by giving her face and form to a painter’s 
gaze. Child ! wiiat you have thought noble, men and 
women have decreed one of the vilest means by which a 
creature traffics in her charms. The first lithe-limbed 
model that he finds in the cities will displace you on his 
canvas and in his memory. Shall he go free — to forget 
you ?” 

She listened dumbly ; her attitude unchanging, as she 
had stood in other days, under the shadow of the boughs, 
to receive the stripes of her master. 

“ He shall be free — to forget me.” 

The words were barely audible, but they were inflexible, 
as they were echoed through her locked teeth. 

The eyes of her tormentor watched her with a wonder- 
ing admiration ; yet he could not resist the pleasure of an 
added cruelty, as the men of the torture-chambers of old 
strained once more the fair fettered form of a female cap- 
tive, that they might see a little longer those bright limbs 
quiver, and those bare nerves heave. 

“ W ell ; be it so if you will it. Only think long enough. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


399 


For strong though you are, you are also weak; for you 
are of your mother’s sex, Folle-Farine. You may repent. 
Think well. You are no more to him than your eponym, 
the mill-dust. You have said so to yourself. But you 
are beautiful in your barbarism ; and here you are always 
near him ; and with a man who has no gold to give, a 
woman need have few rivals to fear. If his heart eat 
itself out here in solitude, soon or late he will be yours, 
Folle-Farine. A man, be he what he will, cannot live 
long without some love, more or less, for some woman. 
A little while, and your Norse-god alone here, disap- 
pointed, embittered, friendless, galled by poverty, and 
powerless to escape, will turn to you, and find a sweetness 
on your lips, a balm in your embrace, an opium draught 
for an hour, at least, in that wonderful beauty of yours. 
A woman who is beautiful, and who has youth, and who 
has passion, need never fail to make a love-light beam in 
the eyes of a man, if only she know how to wait, if only 
she be the sole blossom that grows in his pathway, the 
sole fruit within reach of his hands. Keep him here, and 
soon or late, out of sheer despair of any other paradise, 
he will make his paradise in your breast. Do you doubt ? 
Child, I have known the world many years, but this one 
thing 1 have ever known to be stronger than any strength 
a man can bring against it to withstand it— this one thing 
which fate has given you, the bodily beauty of a woman.” 

His voice ceased softly in the twilight — this voice of 
Mephistopheles — which tempted her but for the sheer 
sole pleasure of straining this strength to see if it should 
break — of deriding this f^aith to see if it would bend — of 
alluring this soul to see if it would fall. 

She stood abased in a piteous shame — the shame that 
any man should thus read her heart, which seemed to 
burn and wither up all liberty, all innocence, all pride in 
her, and leave her a thing too utterly debased to bear the 
gaze of any human eyes, — to bear the light of any noon- 
day sun. * 

And yet the terrible sweetness of the words tempted 
her with such subtle force : the passions of a fierce, amor- 
ous race ran in her blood — the ardor and the liberty of 
an outlawed and sensual people were bred with her flesh 


400 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


and blood : to have been the passion-toy of the man she 
loved for one single day, — to have felt for one brief sum- 
mer hour his arms hold her and his kisses answer hers, 
she would have consented to die a hundred deaths in 
uttermost tortures when the morrow should have dawned, 
and would have died rejoicing, crying to the last breath, — 

“ I have lived : it is enough I” 

He might be hers I The mere thought, uttered in an- 
other’s voice, thrilled through her with a tumultuous 
ecstasy, hot as flame, potent as wine. 

He might be hers — all her own — each pulse of his heart 
echoing hers, each breath of his lips spent on her own. 
He might be hers I — she hid her face upon her hands ; a 
million tongues of fire seemed to curl about her and lap 
her life. The temptation was stronger than her strength. 

She wasti friendless, loveless, nameless thing, and she 
had but one idolatry and one passion, and for this joy 
that they set to her lips she would have given her body 
and her soul. Her soul — if the gods and man allowed 
her one — her soul and all her life, mortal and immortal, 
for one single day of Arslan’s love. Her soul, forever, 
to any hell they would — but his ? 

Not for this had she sold her life to the gods — not for 
this ; not for the rapture of passion, the trance of the 
senses, the heaven of self. 

What she had sworn to them, if they saved him, was 
forever to forget in him herself, to suffer dumbly for him, 
and, whensoever they would, in his stead to die. 

“ Choose,” said the soft wooing voice of her tempter, 
while his gaze smiled on her through the twilight. “ Shall 
he consume his heart here in solitude till he loves you 
perforce, or shall be go free among the cities of men, to 
remember you no more than he remembers the reeds by 
the river?” 

The reeds by the river. 

The chance words that he used, by the mere hazards of 
speech, cut the bonds of passten which were binding so 
closely about her. As the river-reed to the god, so she 
had thought that her brief span of life might be to the 
immortality of his. Was this the fulfilling of her faith, — 
to hold him here with his strength in chains, and his 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


401 


genius perishing in darkness, that she, the thing of an 
hour, might know delight in the reluctant love, in the 
wearied embrace, of a man heart-sick and heart-broken ? 

She shook the deadly sweetness of the beguilement off 
her as she would have shaken an asp’s coils off her wrist, 
and rose against it, and was once more strong. 

“ What have you to do with me ?” she muttered, feebly, 
while the fierce glare of her eyes burned through the 
gloom of the leaves. “Keep your word; set him free. 
His freedom let him use — as he will.” 

Then, ere he could arrest her flight, she had plunged 
into the depths of the orchards, and was lost in their 
flickering shadows. 

Sartorian did not seek to pursue her. He turned and 
went thoughtfully and slowly back by the grass-grown 
footpath through the little wood, along by the riverside, 
to the water-tower. His horses and his people waited 
near, but it suited him to go thither on this errand on 
foot and alone. 

“ The Red Mouse does not dwell in that soul as yet. 
That sublime unreason — that grand barbaric madness! 
And yet both will fall to gold, as that fruit falls to the 
touch,” he thought, as he brushed a ripe yellow pear from 
the shelter of the reddening leaves, and watched it drop, 
and crushed it gently with his foot, and smiled as he saw 
that though so golden on the rind, and so white and so 
fragrant in the flesh, at the core was a rotten speck, in 
which a little black worm was twisting. 

He had shaken it down from idleness ; where he left 
it, crushed in the public pathway, a swarm of ants and 
flieS soon crawled, and flew, and fought, and fastened, 
and fed on the fallen purity, which the winds had once 
tossed up to heaven, and the sun had once kissed into 
bloom. 

♦ * * * -if. 

Through the orchards, as his footsteps died away, there 
came a shrill scream on the silence, which only the sighing 
of the cushats had broken. 

It was the voice of the old serving-woman, who called 
on her name from the porch. 

In the old instinct, born of long obedience, she drew 
34 * 


402 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


herself wearily through the tangled ways of the gardens 
and over the threshold of the house. 

She had lost all remembrance of Flamma’s death, and 
of the inheritance of his wealth. She only thought of 
those great and noble fruits of a man’s genius which she 
,had given up all to save; she only thought ceaselessly, 
in the sickness of her heart, “Will he forget? — forget 
quite — when he is free ?” 

The peasant standing in the porch with arms akimbo, 
and the lean cat rubbing ravenous sides against her 
wooden shoes, peered forth from under the rich red leaves 
of the creepers that shrouded the pointed roof of the door- 
way. 

Her wrinkled face was full of malignity ; her toothless 
mouth smiled ; her eyes were full of a greedy triumph. 
Before her was the shady, quiet, leafy garden, with the 
water running clear beneath the branches ; behind her 
was thO kitchen, with its floor of tiles, its strings of food, 
its wood-piled hearth, its crucifix, and its images of saints. 

She looked at the tired limbs of the creature whom she 
had always hated for her beauty and her youth ; at the 
droop of the proud head, at the pain and the exhaustion 
which every line of the face and the form spoke so 
plainly ; at the eyes which burned so strangely as she 
came through the gray, pure air, and yet had such a look 
in them of sightlessness and stupor. 

“ She has been told,” thought the old serving-woman. 
“ She has been told, and her heart breaks for the gold.” 

The thought was sweet to her — precious with the 
preciousness of vengeance. 

“ Come within,” she said, with a grim smile about her 
mouth. “ I will give thee a crust and a drink of milk. 
None shall say I cannot act like a Christian; and to- 
night I will let thee rest here in the loft, but no longer. 
With the break of day thou shalt tramp. We are Chris- 
tians here.” 

Folle-Farine looked at her with blind eyes, compre- 
hending nothing that she spoke. 

“ You called me ?” she asked, the old mechanical for- 
mula of servitude coming to her lips by sheer unconscious 
instinct. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


403 


Ay, I called. I would have thee to know that I am 
mistress here now ; and I will have no vile things gad 
about in the night so long as they eat of ray bread. To- 
night thou shalt rest here, I say ; so much will I do for 
sake of thy mother, though she was a foul light o’ love, 
when all men deemed her a saint; but to-morrow thou 
shalt tramp. Such hell-spawn as thou art mayst not lie 
on a bed of Holy Church.” 

Folle-Farine gazed at her, confused and still not com- 
prehending ; scarcely awake to the voice which thus ad- 
jured her ; all her strength spent and bruised, after the 
struggle of the temptation which had assailed her. 

“You mean,” she muttered, “you mean What 

would you tell me ? I do not know.” 

The familiar place reeled around her. The saints and 
the satyrs on the carved gables grinned on her horribly. 
The yellow house-leek on the roof seemed to her so much 
gold, which had a tongue, and muttered, “You prate of 
the soul. I alone am the soul of the world.” 

All the green, shadowy, tranquil ways grew strange to 
her ; the earth shook under her feet ; the heavens circled 

around her : and Pitchou, looking on her, thought that 

she was stunned by the loss of the miser’s treasure I 

She I in whose whole burning veins there ran only one 
passion, in whose crushed brain there was only one thought 
— “ Will he forget — forget quite — when he is free ?” 

The old woman stretched her head forward, and cackled 
out eager, hissing, tumultuous words : 

“ Hast not heard ? No ? Well, see, then. Some said 
you should be sent for, but the priest and I said No. 
Neither Law nor Church count the love-begotten. Flamma 
died worth forty thousand francs, set aside all his land and 
household things. God rest his soul ! He was a man. 
He forgot my faithful service, true, but the good almoner 
will remember all that to me. Forty thousand francs I 
What a man 1 And hardly a nettle boiled in oil would he 
eat some days together. Where does this money go — eh, 
eh ? Canst guess ?” 

“Go?” 

Pitchou watched her grimly, and laughed aloud : 

“Ah, ah 1 I know. So you dared to hope, too? Oh, 


404 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


fool I what things did ever he hate as he hated your 
shadow on the wall ? The money, and the lands, and the 
things — every coin, every inch, every crumb — is willed 
away to the Church, to the holy chapter in the town 
yonder, to hold for the will of God and the glory of his 
kingdom. And masses will be said for his soul, daily, in 
the cathedral ; and the gracious almoner has as good as 
said that the mill shall be let to Francvron, the baker, who 
is old and has no women to his house ; and that I shall 
dwell here and manage all things, and rule Francvron, 
and end my days in the chimney corner. And I will 
stretch a point and let you lie in the bay to-night, but to- 
morrow you must tramp, for the devil’s daughter and 
Holy Church will scarce go to roost together.” 

Folle-Farine heard her stupidly, and stupidly gazed 
around ; she did not understand. She had never had any 
other home, and, in a manner, even in the apathy of a far 
greater woe, she clove to this place ; to its familiarity, and 
its silence, and its old woodland-ways. 

“Go!” — she looked down through the aisles of the 
boughs dreamily ; in a vague sense she felt the sharpness 
of desolation that repulses the creature whom no human 
heart desires, and whom no human voice bids stay. 

“ Yes. Go ; and that quickly,” said the peasant with 
a sardonic grin. “ I serve the Church now. It is not for 
me to harbor such as thee ; nor is it fit to take the bread 
of the poor and the pious to feed lips as accursed as are 
thine. Thou mayst lie here to-night — I would not be 
overharsh — but tarry no longer. Take a sup and a bit, 
and to bed. Dost hear ?” 

Folle-Farine, without a word in answer, turned on her 
heel and left her. 

The old woman watched her shadow pass across the 
'threshold, and away down the garden-paths between the 
green lines of the clipped box, and vanish beyond the fall 
of drooping fig-boughs and the walls of ivy and of laurel ; 
then with a chuckle she poured out her hot coffee, and sat 
in her corner and made her evening meal, well pleased ; 
comfort was secured her for the few years which she 
had to live, and she was revenged for the loss of the 
sequins. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


405 


“ How well it is for rae that I went to mass every 
Saint’s-day !” she thought, foreseeing easy years and plenty 
under the rule of the Church and of old deaf Francvron, 
the baker. 

Folle-Farine mounted the wooden ladder to the hayloft 
which had been her sleeping-chamber, there took the little 
linen and the few other garments which belonged to her, 
folded them together in her winter sheepskin, and went 
down the wooden steps once more, and out of the mill- 
garden across the bridge into the "woods. 

She had no fixed purpose even for the immediate hour; 
she had not even a tangible thought for her future. She 
acted on sheer mechanical impulse, like one who does 
some things unconsciously, walking abroad in the trance 
of sleep. That she was absolutely destitute scarcely 
bore any sense to her. She had never realized that this 
begrudged roof and scanty fare, which Flamma had be- 
stowed on her, had, wretched though they were, yet been 
all the difference between home and homelessness — be- 
tween existence and starvation. 

She wandered on aimlessly through the woods. 

She paused a moment on the river-sand, and turned 
and looked back at the mill and the house. From where 
she stood, she could see its brown gables and its peaked 
roof rising from masses of orchard-blossom, white and 
wide as sea-foam ; further round it, closed the dark belt 
of the sweet chestnut woods. 

She looked ; and great salt tears rushed into her hot 
eyes and blinded them. 

She had been hated by those who dwelt there, and had 
there known only pain, and toil, and blows, and bitter 
words. And yet the place itself was dear to her, its 
homely and simple look : its quiet garden-ways, its dells 
of leafy shadow, its bright and angry waters, its furred 
and feathered creatures that gave it life and loveliness, — 
these had been her consolations often, — these, in a way, 
she loved. 

Such as it was, her life had been bound up with it; 
and though often its cool pale skies and level lands had 
been a prison to her, yet her heart clove to it in this 
moment when she left it — forever. She looked once at 


40G 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


it long and lingeringly; then turned and went on her 
way. 

She walked slowly through the cool evening shadows, 
while the birds fluttered about her head. She did not 
comprehend the terrible fate that had befallen her. She 
did not think that it was horrible to have nO canopy but 
the clear sky, and no food but the grain rubbed from the 
ripe wheat-ears. 

The fever of conscious passion which had been born in 
her, and the awe of the lonely death that she had wit- 
nessed, were on her too heavily, and with too dreamy 
and delirious an absorption, to leave any room in her 
thoughts for the bodily perils or the bodily privations of 
her fate. 

Some vague expectancy of some great horror, she 
knew not what, was on her. She was as in a trance, her 
brain was gidd}’^, her eyes blind. Though she walked 
straightly, bearing her load upon her head, on and on 
as through the familiar paths, she yet had no goal, no 
sense of what she meant to do, or whither she desired 
to go. 

The people were still about, going from their work in 
the fields, and their day at the town-market, to their 
homesteads and huts. Every one of them cast some 
word at her. For the news had spread by sunset over 
all the countryside that Flamma’s treasure was gone to 
Holy Church. 

They were spoken in idleness, but they were sharp, 
flouting, merciless arrows of speech, that struck her 
hardly as the speakers cast them, and laughed, and passed 
by her. She gave no sign that she heard, not by so 
much as the quiver of a muscle or the glance of an eye ; 
but she, nevertheless, was stung by them to the core, and 
her heart hardened, and her blood burned. 

Not one of them, man or boy, but made a mock of her 
as they marched by through the purpling leaves or the 
tall seed-grasses. Not one of them, mother or maiden, 
that gave a gentle look at her, or paused to remember 
that she was homeless, and knew no more where to lay 
her head that night than any sick hart driven from its 
kind. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


407 


She met many in the soft gray and golden evening, in 
the fruit-hung ways, along the edge of the meadows : 
fathers with their litfle children running by them, laden 
with plumes of meadow-sweet ; mothers bearing their 
youngest born before them on the high sheepskin saddle ; 
young lovers talking together as they drove the old cow 
to her byre; old people counting their market gains 
cheerily; children paddling knee-deep in the brooks for 
cresses. None of them had a kindly glance for her ; — all 
had a flouting word. There was not one who offered her 
-so much as a draught of milk; not one who wished her 
so much as a brief good-night. 

“She will quit the country now; that is one good 
thing,” she heard many of them say of her. And they 
spoke of Flamma, and praised him ; saying, how pure as 
mvrrh in the nostrils was the death of one who feared 
God! 

The night came on nearer ; the ways grew more lonely; 
the calf bleating sought its dam, the sheep folded down 
close together, the lights came out under the lowly roofs ; 
now and then from some open window in the distance 
there came the sound of voices singing together ; now 
and then there fell across her path two shadows turning- 
one to the other. 

She only was alone. 

What did she seek to do ? 

She paused on a little slip of moss-green timber that 
crossed the water in the open plain, and looked down at 
herself in the shining stream. None desired her — none 
remembered her ; none said to her, “ Stay with us a little, 
for love’s sake.” 

“ Surely I must be vile as they say, that all are against 
me!” she thought; and she pondered wearily in her 
heart where her sin against them could lie. That brief 
delirious trance of joy tlJ^it had come to her with the 
setting of the last day’s sun, had with the sun sunk away. 
The visions which had haunted her sleep under the thorn- 
tree whilst the thrush sang, had been killed under the 
cold and bitterness of the waking world. She wondered, 
while her face burned red with shame, what she had been 
mad enough to dream of in that sweet cruel slumber. 


408 


FOLLE-FARINE, 


For him — she felt that sooner than again look upward to 
his eyes she would die by a thousand deaths. 

What was she to him ? — a barbarous, worthless, and 
unlovely thing, whose very service was despised, whose 
very sacrifice was condemned. 

“ I would live as a leper all the days of my life, if, first, 
I might be fair in his sight one hour I” she thought ; and 
she was conscious of horror or of impiety in the ghastly 
desire, because she had but one religion, this— her love. 

She crossed the little bridge, and sat down to rest on 
the root of an old oak on the edge of the fields of 
poppies. 

The evening had fallen quite. There was a bright 
moon on the edge of the plain. The cresset-lights of the 
cathedral glowed through the dusk. All was purple and 
gray and still. There were the scents of heavy earths 
and of wild thymes, and the breath of grazing herds. 
The little hamlets were but patches of darker shade on 
the soft brown shadows of the night. White sea-mists, 
curling and rising, chased each other over the dim world. 

She sat motionless, leaning her head upon her hand. 

She could not weep, as other creatures could. The 
hours drew on. She had no home to go to ; but it was 
not for this that she sorrowed. 

Afar off, a step trod down the grasses. A hawk rustled 
through the gloom. A rabbit fled across the path. The 
boughs were put aside by a human hand ; Arslan came 
out from the darkness of the woods before her. 

With a sharp cry she sprang to her feet and fled, im- 
pelled by passionate, reasonless instinct to hide herself 
forever and forever from the only eyes she loved. 

Before her were the maze of the poppy-fields. In the 
moonlight their blossoms, so gorgeous at sunset or at 
noon, lost all their scarlet gaud and purple pomp, and 
drooped like discrowned kings stripped bare in the mid- 
night of calamity. 

Their colorless flowers writhed and twined about her 
ankles. Her brown limbs glistened in the gleam from 
the skies. She tightened her red girdle round her loins 
and ran, as a doe runs to reach the sanctuary. 

Long withes of trailing grasses, weeds that grew 


FOLLE-FARINE, 


409 


among the grasses, caught her fleet feet and stopped her. 
The earth was wet with dew. A tangle of boughs and 
brambles filled the path. For once, her sure steps failed 
her. She faltered and fell. 

Ere he could touch her, she rose again. The scent of 
the wet leaves was in her hair. The rain-drops glistened 
on her feet. The light of the stars seemed in her burn- 
ing eyes. Around her were the gleam of the night, the 
scent of the flowers, the smell of woods. On her face 
the moon shone. 

Slie was like a creature born from the freshness of 
dews, from the odor of foliage, from the hues of the clouds, 
from the foam of the brooks, from all things of the woods 
and the water. In that moment she was beautiful with 
the beauty of women. 

* ‘‘ If only she could content me I” he thought. If only 

he had cared for the song of the reed by the river ! 

But he cared nothing at all for anything that lived ; 
and a pursuit that was passionless had always seemed to 
him base ; and his feet were set on a stony and narrow 
road where he would not incumber his strength with a 
thing of her sex, lest the burden should draw him back- 
ward one rood on his way. 

He had never loved her; he never would love her; his 
senses were awake to her beauty, indeed, and his reason 
awed it beyond all usual gifts of her sex. But he had 
used it in the service of his art, and therein had scruti- 
nized, and portrayed, and debased until it had lost to him 
all that fanciful sanctity, all that half-mysterious charm, 
which arouse the passion of love in a man to a woman. 

So he let her be, and stood by her in the dusk of the 
night with no light in his own eyes. 

“ Do not fly from me,” he said to her. “ I have sought 
you, to ask your forgiveness, and ” 

She stood silent, her head bent ; her hands were crossed 
upon her chest in the posture habitual to her under any 
pain ; her face was hidden in the shadow; her little bun- 
dle of clothes had dropped on the grasses, and was hidden 
by them. Of Flamrna’s death and of her homelessness 
he had heard nothing. 

“ I was harsh to you,” he said, gently. “ I spoke, in 
35 


410 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


the bitterness of my heart, unworthily. I was stung 
with a great shame ; — I forgot that you could not know. 
Can you forgive 

“ The madness was mine,” she muttered. “ It was I, 
who forgot ” 

Her voice was very faint, and left her lips with effort ; 
she did not look up ; she stood bloodless, breathless, 
swaying to and fro, as a young tree which has been cut 
through near the roorsways ere it falls. Sne knew well 
what his words would say. 

“ You are generous, and you shame me — indeed — 
thus,” he said with a certain softness as of unwilling 
pain in his voice Vhich shook its coldness and serenity. 

This greatness in her, this wondrous faithfulness to 
himself, this silence, which bore all wounds from his hand, 
and was never broken to utter one reproach against him,' 
these moved him. He could not choose but see that this 
nature, which he bruised and forsook, was noble beyond 
any common nobility of any human thing. 

“ I have deserved little at your hands, and you have 
given me much,” he said slowly. “ I feel base and un- 
worthy ; for — I have sought you to bid you farewell.” 

She had awaited her death-blow ; she received its stroke 
without a sound. 

She did not move, nor cry out, nor make any sign of 
pain, but standing there her form curled within itself, 
as a withered fern curls, and all her beauty changed 
like a fresh flower that is held in a flame. 

She did not look at him ; but waited, with her head 
bent, and her hands crossed on her breast as a criminal 
waits for his doom. 

His nerve nearly failed him ; his heart nearly yielded. 
He had no love for her; she was nothing to him. No 
more than any one of the dark, nude savage women who 
had sat to his art on the broken steps of ruined Temples 
of the Sun ; or the antelope-eyed creatures of desert and 
plain, who had come on here before him in the light of the 
East, and had passed as the shadows passed, and, like 
them, were forgotten. 

She was nothing to him. And yet he could not choose 
but think — all this mighty love, all this majestic strength. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


411 


all this superb and dreamy loveliness would die out here, 
as the evening colors had died out of the skies in the 
west, none pausing even to note that they were dead. 

He knew that he had but to say to her, “ Come I” and 
she would go beside him, whether to shame or ignominy, 
or famine or death, triumphant and rejoicing as the mar- 
tyrs of old went to the flames, which were to them the 
gates of paradise. 

He knew that there would not be a blow his hand could 
deal which could make her deem him cruel ; he knew that 
there would be no crime which he could bid her commit 
for him which would not seem to her a virtue ; he knew 
that for one hour of his love she would slay herself by 
any death he told her; he knew that the deepest wretch- 
edness lived through by his side would be sweeter and 
more glorious than any kingdom of the world or heaven. 
And he knew well that to no man is it given to be loved 
twice with such love as this. 

Yet, — he loved not her ; and he was, therefore, strong, 
and he drove the death-stroke home, with pity, with com- 
passion, with gentleness, yet surely home — to the heart. 

“ A stranger came to me an hour or more ago,” he said 
to her ; and it seemed even to him as though he slew a 
life godlier and purer and stronger than his own, — “ an 
old man, who gave no name. I have seen his face — far 
away, long ago — I am not sure. The memory is too 
vague. He seemed a man of knowledge, and a man crit- 
ical and keen. That study of you — the one among the 
poppies — you remember — took his eyes and pleased him. 
He bore it away with him, and left in its stead a roll of 
paper money — money enough to take me back among 
men — to set me free for a little space. Oh child ! you 
have seen — this hell on earth kills me. It is a death in 
life. It has made me brutal to you sometimes ; sometimes 
I must hurt something, or go mad.” 

She was silent ; her attitude had not changed, but all 
her loveliness was like one of the poppies that his foot 
had trodden on, discolored, broken, ruined. She stood as 
though changed to a statue of bronze. 

He looked on her, and knew that no creature had ever 
loved him as this creature had loved. But of love he 


412 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


wanted nothing, — it was wearying to him ; all be desired 
was power among men. 

“ I have been cruel to you,” he said, suddenly. “ I 
have stung and wounded you often I have dealt with 
your beauty as with this flower under my foot. I have 
had no pity for you. Can you forgive me ere I go ?” 

“You have no sins to me,” she made answer to him. 
She did not stir ; nor did the deadly calm on her face 
change ; but her voice had a harsh metallic sound, like 
the jar of a bell that is broken. 

lie was silent also. The coldness and the arrogance of 
his heart were pained and humbled by her pardon of them. 
He knew that he had been pitiless to her — with a pitiless- 
ness less excusable than that which is born of the fierce- 
ness of passion and the idolatrous desires of the senses. 
Man would have held him blameless here, because he had 
forborne to pluck for his own delight this red and gold 
reed in the swamp; but he himself knew well that, never- 
theless, he had trodden its life out, and so bruised it, as he 
went, that never would any wind of heaven breathe music 
through its shattered grace again. 

“ When do you go?” she asked. 

Her voice had still the same harsh, broken sound in it. 
She did not lift the lids of her eyes; her arms were 
crossed upon her breast ; — all the ruins of the trampled 
})oppy-blossom were about her, blood-red as a field where 
men have fought and died. 

He answered her, “At dawn.” 

“ And where ?” 

“To Paris. I will find fame — or a grave.” 

A long silence fell between them. The church chimes, 
far away in the darkness, tolled the ninth hour. She 
stood passive, colorless as the poppies were, bloodless 
from the thick, dull beating of her heart. The purple 
shadow and the white stars swam around her. Her heart 
was broken ; but she gave no sign. It was her nature to 
suffer to the last in silence. 

He looked at her, and his own heart softened; almost 
he repented him. 

He stretched his arms to her, and drew her into them, 
and kissed the dew-laden weight of her hair, and the 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


413 


curling, meek form, while all warmth had died, and the 
passionate loveliness, which was cast to him, to be folded 
in his bosom or thrust away by his foot — as he chose. 

“Oh, child, forgive me, and forget me,’^ he murmured. 
“ I have been base to you, — brutal, and bitter, and cold 
oftentimes ; — yet I would have loved you, if 1 could. 
Love would have been youth, folly, oblivion ; all the near- 
est likeness that men get of happiness on earth. But love 
is dead in me, I think, otherwise ” 

She burned like fire, and grew cold as ice in his embrace. 
Her brain reeled ; her sight was blind. She trembled as 
she had never done under the sharpest throes of Flamma’s 
scourge. Suddenly she cast her arms about bis throat 
and clung to him, and kissed him in answer with that 
strange, mute, terrible passion with which the lips of the 
dying kiss the warm and living face that bends above 
them, on which they know they never again will rest. 

Then she broke from him, and sprang into the maze of 
the moonlit fields, and fled from him like a stag that bears 
its death-shot in it, and knows it, and seeks to hide itself 
and die unseen. 

He pursued her, urged by a desire that was cruel, and 
a sorrow that was tender. He had no love for her ; and 
yet — now that he had thrown her from him forever — he 
would fain have felt those hot mute lips tremble again in 
their terrible eloquence upon his own. 

But he sought her in vain. The shadows of the night 
hid her from him. 

He went back to his home alone. 

“ It is best so,’’ he said to himself. 

For the life that lay before him he needed all his 
strength, all his coldness, all his cruelty. And she was 
only a female thing — a reed of the river, songless, and 
blown by the wind as the rest were. 

He returned to his solitude, and lit his lamp, and looked 
on the creations that alone he loved. 

“They shall live — or I will die,” he said to his own 
heart. With the war to which he went what had any 
amorous toy to do ? 

That night Hermes had no voice for him. 

Else might the wise god have said, “ Man v reeds grow to- 
35 * 


414 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


gether by the river, and men tread them at will, and none 
are the worse. But in one reed of a million song is hidden ; 
and when a man carelessly breaks that reed in twain, he 
may miss its music often and long, — yea, all the years of 
his life.” 

But Hermes that night spake not. 

And he brake his reed, and cast it behind him.. 


CHAPTER V. 

When the dawn came, it found her lying face down- 
ward among the rushes by the river. She had run on, 
and on, and on blindly, not knowing whither she fled, 
with the strange force that despair lends ; then suddenly 
had dro])ped, as a young bull drops in the circus with the 
steel sheathed in its brain. There she had remained in- 
sensible, the blood flowing a little from her mouth. 

It was quite lonely by the waterside. A crane among 
the sedges, an owl on the wind, a water-lizard under the 
stones, such were the only moving things. It was in a 
solitary bend of the stream; its banks were green and 
quiet; there were no dwellings near; and there was no 
light anywhere, except the dull glow of the lamp above 
the Calvary. 

No one found her. A young fox came and smelt at 
her, and stole frightened away. That was all. A sharp 
wind rising with the reddening of the east blew on her, 
and recalled her to consciousness after many hours. 
When her eyes at length opened, with a blank stare upon 
the grayness of the shadows, she lifted herself a little and 
sat still, and wondered what had chanced to her. 

The first rays of the sun rose over the dim blue haze 
of the horizon. She looked at it and tried to remember, 
but failed. Her brain was sick and dull. 

A little beetle, green and bronze, climbed in and out 
among the sand of the river-shore ; her eyes vacantly fol- 
lowed the insect’s aimless circles. She tried to think. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


415 


and could not; her thoughts went feebly and madly 
round and round, round and round, as the beetle went in 
his maze of sand. It was all so gray, so still, so chill, 
she was afraid of it. Her limbs were stiffened by the 
exposure and dews of the night. She shivered and was 
cold. 

The sun rose — a globe of flame above the edge of the 
world. 

Memory flashed on her with its light. 

She rose a little, staggering and blind, and weak- 
ened by the loss of blood ; she crept feebly to the edge 
of the stream, and washed the stains from her lips, and 
let her face rest a little in the sweet, silent, flowing- 
water. 

Then she sat still amidst the long rushlike grass, and 
thought, and thought, and wondered why life was so 
tough and merciless a thing, that it would ache on, and 
burn on, and keep misery awake to know itself even when 
its death-blow had been dealt, and the steel was in its 
side. 

She was still only half sensible of her wretchedness. 
She was numbed by weakness, and her brain seemed 
deadened by a hot pain, that shot through it as with 
tongues of flame. 

The little beetle at her feet was busied in a yellower 
soil than sand. He moved round and round in a little 
dazzling heap of coins and trembling paper thin as gauze. 
She saw it without seeing for awhile ; then, all at once, 
a horror flashed on her. She saw that the money had 
fallen from her tunic. She guessed the truth — that in his 
last embrace he had slid into her bosom, in notes and in 
coin, half that sum whereof he had spoken as the ransom 
which had set him free. 

Her bloodless face grew scarlet with an immeasurable 
shame. She would have suffered far less if he had killed 
her. 

He who denied her love to give her gold I Better 
that, when he had kissed her, he had covered her eyes 
softly with one hand, and with the other driven his knife 
straight through the white warmth of her breast. 

The sight of the gold stung her like a snake. 


416 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


Gold ! — such wage as men flung to the painted harlots 
gibing at the corners of the streets I 

The horror of the humiliation filled her with loathing 
of herself. Unless she had become shameful in his 
sight, she thought, he could not have cast this shame 
upon her. 

She gathered herself slowly up, and stood and looked 
with blind, aching eyes at the splendor of the sunrise. 

Her heart was breaking. 

Her one brief dream of gladness was severed sharply, 
as with a sword, and killed forever. 

She did not reason — all thought was stunned in her ; 
but as a woman, who loves looking on the face she loves, 
will see sure death written there long ere any other can 
detect it, so she knew, by the fatal and unerring instinct 
of passion, that he was gone from her as utterly and as 
eternally as though his grave had closed on him. 

She did not even in her own heart reproach him. Her 
love for him was too perfect to make rebuke against him 
possible to her. Had he not a right to go as he would, 
to do as he chose, to take her or leave her, as best might 
seem to him ? Only he had no right to shame her with 
what he had deemed shame to himself ; no right to insult 
what he had slain. 

She gathered herself slowly up, and took his money in 
her hand, and went along the river-bank. Whither ? 
She had no knowledge at first ; but, as she moved against 
the white light and the cool currents of the morning air, 
her brain cleared a little. The purpose that had risen in 
her slowly matured and strengthened ; without its suste- 
nance she would have sunk down and perished, like a 
flower cut at the root. 

Of all the world that lay beyond the pale of those 
golden and russet orchards and scarlet lakes of blowing 
poppies she had no more knowledge than the lizard at 
her feet. 

Cities, he had often said, were as fiery furnaces that 
consumed all youth and innocence which touched them : 
for such as she to go to them was, he had often said, to 
cast a luscious and golden peach of the summer into the 
core of a wasps’-nest. Nevertheless, her mind was reso- 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


4n 

lute to follow him, — to follow him unknown by him ; so 
that, if his footsteps turned to brighter paths, her shadow 
might never fall across his ways; but so that, if need 
were, if failure Still pursued him, and by failure came 
misery and death, she would be there beside him, to share 
those fatal gifts which none would dispute with her or 
grudge her. 

To follow him was to her an instinct as natural and as 
irresistible as it is to the dog to track his master’s wan- 
derings. 

She would have starved ere ever she would have told 
him that she hungered. She would have perished by the 
roadside ere ever she would have cried to him that she 
was homeless. She would have been torn asunder for a 
meal by wolves ere she would have bought safety or suc- 
cor by one coin of that gold he had slid into her bosom, 
like the wages of a thing that was vile. 

But to follow him she never hesitated: unless this had 
been possible to her, she would have refused to live an- 
other hour. The love in her, at once savage and sublime, 
at once strong as the lion’s rage and humble as the camel’s 
endurance, made her take patiently all wrongs at his 
hands, but made her powerless to imagine a life in which 
he was not. 

She went slowly now through the country, in the hush 
of the waking day. 

He had said that he would leave at dawn. 

In her unconscious agony of the night gone by, she 
had run far and fast ere she had fallen ; and now, upon 
her waking, she had found herself some league from the 
old mill-woods, and farther yet from the tower on the 
river where he dwelt. 

She was weak, and the way seemed very long to her ; 
ever and again, too, she started aside and hid herself, 
thinking each step were his. She wanted to give him 
back his gold, yet she felt as though one look of his eyes 
would kill her. 

It was long, and the sun was high, ere she had dragged 
her stiff and feeble limbs through the long grasses of the 
shore and reached the ruined granary. Crouching down, 
and gazing through the spaces in the stones from which 


418 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


so often she had watched him, she saw at once that the 
place was desolate. 

The great Barabbas, and the painted panels and can- 
vases, -and all the pigments and tools and articles of an 
artist’s store, were gone; but the figures on the walls 
were perforce left there to perish. The early light fell 
full upon them, sad and calm and pale, living their life 
upon the stone. 

She entered and looked at them. 

She loved them greatly; it pierced her heart to leave 
them there — alone. 

The bound Helios working at the mill, with white 
Hermes watching, mute and content ; — and Persephone 
crouching in the awful shadow of the dread winged King, 
— the Greek youths, with doves in their breasts and 
golden apples in their hands, — the women dancing upon 
Cithseron in the moonlight, — the young gladiator wrest- 
ling with the Libyan lion, — all the familiar shapes and 
stories that made the gray walls teem with the old sweet 
life of the heroic times, were there — left to the rat and 
the spider, the dust and the damp, the slow, sad death 
of a decay which no heart would sorrow for, nor any 
hand arrest. 

The days would come and go, the suns would rise and 
set, the nights would fall, and the waters flow, and the 
great stars throb above in the skies, and they would be 
there — alone. 

To her they were living things, beautiful and divine ; 
they were bound up with all the hours of her love ; and 
at their feet she had known the one brief dream of ec- 
stasy that had sprung up for her, great and golden as the 
prophet’s gourd, and as the gourd in a night had withered. 

She held them in a passionate tenderness — these, the 
first creatures who had spoken to her with a smile, and 
had brought light into the darkness of her life. 

She flung herself on the ground and kissed its dust, 
and prayed for them in an agony of prayer — prayed for 
them that the hour might come, and come quickly, when 
men would see the greatness of their maker, and would 
remember them, and seek them, and bear them forth in 
honor and in worship to the nations. She prayed in an 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


419 


agony ; prayed blindly, and to whom she knew not ; 
prayed, in the sightless instinct of the human heart, to- 
wards some greater strength which could bestow at once 
retribution and consolation. 

Nor was it so much for him as for them that she thus 
prayed : in loving them she had reached the pure and 
impersonal passion of the artist. To have them live, 
she would have given her own life. 

Then the bonds of her agony seemed to be severed ; 
and, for the first time, she fell into a passion of tears, and, 
stretched there on the floor of the forsaken chamber, wept 
as women weep upon a grave. 

When she arose, at length, she met the eyes of Hypnos 
and Oneiros and Thanatos — the gentle gods who give 
forgetfulness to men. 

They were her dear gods, her best beloved and most 
compassionate; yet their look struck coldly to her heart. 

Sleep, Dreams, and Death, — were these the only gifts 
with which the gods, being merciful, could answer prayer ? 


CHAPTER YI. 

At the little quay in the town many boats were lading 
and unlading, and many setting their sails to go south- 
ward with their loads of eggs, or of birds, of flowers, of 
fruit, or of herbage ; all smelling of summer rain, and the 
odors of freshly plowed earths turned up with the nest 
of the lark and the root of the cowslip laid bare in them. 

Folle-Farine lost herself in its little busy crowd, and 
learned what she needed without any asking, in turn, 
question of her. 

Arslkn had sailed at sunrise. 

There was a little boat, with an old man in it, loaded 
with Russian violets from a flower-farm. The old man 
was angered and in trouble : the lad who steered for him 
had failed him, and the young men and boys on the 
canals were all too busied to be willing to go the voyage 


420 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


for the wretched pittance he offered. She heard, and 
leaned towards him. 

“ Do you go the way to Paris V' 

The old man nodded. 

“ I will steer for you, then,” she said to him ; and 
leaped down among his fragrant freight. He was a 
stranger to her, and let her be. She did for him as well 
as another, since she said that she knew those waters well. 

He was in haste, and, without more words, he loo.sened 
his sail, and cut his moor-rope, and set his little vessel 
adrift down the water-ways of the town, the violets filling 
the air with their odors and blue as the eyes of a child 
that wakes smiling. 

All the old familiar streets, all the dusky gateways and 
dim passages, all the ropes on which the lanterns and the 
linen hung, all the wide carved stairways water-washed, 
all the dim windows that the women filled with pots of 
ivy and the song of birds, — she was drifting from them 
with every pulse of the tide, never again to return ; but 
she looked at them without seeing them, indifferent, and 
having no memory of them ; her brain, and her heart, and 
her soul were with the boat that she followed. 

It was the day of the weekly market. The broad flat- 
bottomed boats were coming in at sunrise, in each some 
cargo of green food or of farm produce ; a strong girl 
rowing with bare arms, and the sun catching the white 
glint of her head-gear. Boys with coils of spotted birds’ 
eggs, children with lapfuls of wood-gathered primroses, 
old women nursing a wicker cage of cackling hens or hiss- 
ing geese, mules and asses, shaking their bells and worsted 
tassels, bearing their riders high on sheepskin saddles, — 
these all went by her on the river, or on the towing path, 
or on the broad highroad that ran for a space by the 
water’s edge. 

All of these knew her well ; all of these some time or 
another had jeered her, jostled her, flouted her, or fled 
from her. But no one stopped her. No one cared enough 
for her to care even to wonder whither she went. 

She glided out of the town, past the banks she knew 
so w'ell, along the line of the wood and the orchards of 
Ypres, But what at another time would have had pain 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


421 


for her, and held her with the bonds of a sad familiarity, 
now scarcely moved her. One great grief and one great 
passion had drowned all lesser woes, and scorched all 
slighter memories. 

All day long they sailed. 

At noon the old man gave her a little fruit and a crust 
as part of her wage ; she tried to eat them, knowing she 
•would want all her strength. 

Tliey left the course of the stream that she knew, and 
sailed farther than she had ever sailed ; passed towns 
whose bells were ringing, and noble bridges gleaming in 
the sun, and water-mills black and gruesome, and bright 
orchards and vineyards heavy with the promise of fruit. 
She knew none of them. There were only the water flow- 
'\rg under the keel, and the blue sky above, with the rooks 
circling in it, which had the look of friends to her. 

The twilight fell ; still the wind served, and still they 
held on; the mists came, white and thick, and stars rose, 
and the voices from the shores sounded strangely, with 
here and there a note of music or the deep roll of a drum. 

So she drifted out of the old life into an unknown world. 
But she never once looked back. Why should she? — He 
had gone before. 

When it was quite night, they drew near to a busy 
town, whose lights glittered by hundreds and thousands 
on the bank. There were many barges and small boats 
at anchor in its wharves, hanging out lanterns at their 
mast-heads. The old man bade her steer his boat among 
them, and with a cord he made it fast. 

“ This is Paris ?’’ she asked breathlessly 

The old man laughed : 

“ Paris is days’ sail away.” 

“ I asked you if you went to Paris ?” 

The old man laughed again : 

“ I said I came the Paris way. So I have done. 
Land.” 

Her face set with an anger that made him wince, dull 
though his conscience was. 

“ You cheated me,” she said, briefly; and she climbed 
the boat’s side, and, shaking the violets off her, set her 
foot upon the pier, not stopping to waste more words. 

36 


422 


FOLLE-FARINB. 


But a great terror fell on her. 

She had thought that the boat would bring her straight 
to Paris ; and, once in Paris, she had thought that it would 
be as easy to trace his steps there as it had been in the 
little town that she had left. She had had no sense of 
distance — no knowledge of the size of cities; the width, 
and noise, and hurry, and confusion of this one waterside 
town made her helpless and stupid. 

She stood like a young lost dog upon the flags of the 
landing-place, not knowing whither to go, nor what to do. 

The old man, busied in unlading his violets into the 
wicker creels of the women waiting for them, took no 
notice of her ; why should he ? He had used her so long 
as he had wanted her. 

There were incessant turmoil, outcry, and uproar round 
the landing-stairs, where large cargoes of beetroot, cab- 
bages, and fish were being put on shore. The buyers 
and the sellers screamed and swore ; the tawny light of 
oil-lamps flickered over their furious faces ; the people 
jostled her, pushed her, cursed her, for being in the way. 
She shrank back in bewilderment and disgust, and walked 
feebly away from the edge of the river, trying to think, 
trying to get back her old health and her old force. 

The people of the streets were too occupied to take any 
heed of her. Only one little ragged boy danced before 
her a moment, shrieking, “ The gypsy ! the gypsy I Good 
little fathers, look to your pockets I” 

But she was too used to the language of abuse to be 
moved by it. She went on, as though she were deaf, 
through the yelling of the children and the chattering and 
chaffering of the trading multitude. 

There was a little street leading off the quay, pic- 
turesque and ancient, with parquetted houses and quaint 
painted signs ; at the corner of it sat an old woman on a 
wooden stool, with a huge fan of linen on her head like 
a mushroom. She was selling roasted chestnuts by the 
glare of a little horn lantern. 

By this woman she paused, and asked the way to Paris. 

“ Paris I This is a long way from Paris.” 

“ IIow far — to walk 

“ That depends. My boy went up there on foot last 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


423 


summer ; he is a young fool, blotting and messing with 
ink and paper, while he talks of being a great man, and 
sups with the rats in the sewers ! He, I think, was a 
week walking it. It is pleasant enough in fair weather. 
But you — you are a gypsy. Where are your people 

‘‘ I have no people.” 

She did not know even what this epithet of gypsy, 
which they so often cast at her, really meant. She re- 
membered the old life of the Liebana, but she did not 
know what manner of life it had been ; and since Phra- 
tos had left her there, no one of his tribe or of his 
kind had been seen in the little Norman town among the 
orchards. 

The old woman grinned, trimming her lantern. 

“ If you are too bad for them, you must be bad indeed I 
You will do very well for Paris, no doubt.” 

And she began to count her chestnuts, lest this stranger 
should steal any of them. 

Folle-Farine took no notice of the words. 

Will you show me which is the road to take ?” she 
asked. Meanwhile the street-boy had brought three or 
four of his comrades to stare at her ; and they were dan- 
cing round her with grotesque grimace, and singing, 
“ Houpe la, Iloupe la ! Burn her for a witch !” 

The woman directed her which road to go as well as 
she could for the falling darkness, and she thanked the 
woman and went The street-children ran at her heels 
like little curs, yelling and hissing foul language ; but 
she ran too, and was swifter than they, and outstripped 
them, the hardy training of her limbs standing her in 
good service. 

How far she ran, or what streets she traversed, she 
could not tell ; the chestnut-seller had said “Leave the 
pole-star behind you,” and the star was shining behind 
her always, and she ran south steadily. 

Great buildings, lighted casements, high stone walls, 
groups of people, troopers drinking, girls laughing, men 
playing dominoes in the taverns, women chattering in 
the coffee-houses, a line of priests going to a death-bed 
with the bell ringing before the Host, a line of soldiers 
filing through great doors as the drums rolled the r entree 


424 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


au caserne , — thousands of these pictures glowed in her 
path a moment, with the next to fade and give place to 
others. But she looked neither to the right nor left, and 
held on straightly for the south. 

Once or twice a man halloed after her, or a soldier 
tried to stop her. Once, going through the gateway in 
the southern wall, a sentinel challenged her, and leveled 
his bayonet only a second too late. But she eluded them 
all by the swiftness of her flight and the suddenness of 
her apparition, and she got out safe beyond the barriers 
of the town, and on to the road that led to the country, — 
a road quiet and white in the moonlight, and bordered on 
either side with the tall poplars and the dim bare reapen 
fields which looked to her like dear familiar friends. 

It was lonely, and she sat down on a stone by the 
wayside and rested. She had no hesitation in what she 
was doing. He had gone south, and she would go like- 
wise ; that she might fail to find him there, never occurred 
to her. Of what a city was she had not yet any concep- 
tion ; her sole measurement of one was by the little towns 
whither she had driven the mules to sell the fruits and 
the fowls. 

To have been cheated of Paris, and to find herself thus 
far distant from it, appalled her, and made her heart 
sink. 

But it had no power to make her hesitate in the course 
she took. She had no fear and no doubt : the worst 
thing that could have come to her had come already ; 
the silence and the strength of absolute despair were on 
her. 

Besides, a certain thrill of liberty was on her. For the 
first time in all her life she was absolutely free, with the 
freedom of the will and of the body both. 

She was no longer captive to one place, bond-slave to 
one tyranny ; she was no longer driven with curses and 
commands, and yoked and harnessed every moment of 
her days. To her, with the blood of a tameless race in 
her, there was a certain force and elasticity in this de- 
liverance from bondage, ‘that lifted some measure of her 
great woe off her. She could not be absolutely wretched 
so long as the open sky was above her, and the smell of 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


425 


the fields about her, and on her face the breath of the 
blowing winds. 

She had that love which is as the bezoar stone of 
fable — an amulet that makes all wounds unfelt, and death 
a thing to smile at in derision. 

Without some strong impulsion from without, she 
might never have cut herself adrift from the tyranny that 
had held her down from childhood ; and even the one 
happiness she had known had been but little more than 
the exchange of one manner of slavery for another. 

But now she was free — absolutely free ; and in the calm, 
cool night — in the dusk and the solitude, with the smell 
of the fields.around her, and above her the stars, she knew 
it and was glad, — glad even amidst the woe of loneliness 
and the agony of abandonment. The daughter of Taric 
could not be absolutely wretched so long as the open air 
was about her, and the world was before her wherein to 
roam. 

She sat awhile by the roadside and counted his gold 
by the gleam of the stars, and put it away securely in 
her girdle, and drank from a brook beside her, and tried 
to eat a little of the bread which the old boatman had 
given her as her wages, with three pieces of copper 
money. 

But the crust choked her ; she felt hot with fever, and 
her throat was parched and full of pain. 

The moon was full upon her where she sat; the red 
and white of her dress bore a strange look ; her face was 
colorless, and her eyes looked but the larger and more 
lustrous for the black shadows beneath them, and the 
weary swollen droop of their lids. 

She sat there, and pondered on the next step she had 
best take. 

A woman came past her, and stopped and looked. 

The moonlight was strong upon her face. 

You are a handsome wench,” said the wayfarer, who 
was elderly and of pleasant visage ; “ too handsome, a 
vast deal, to be sitting alone like one lost. What is the 
matter?” 

“ Nothing,” she answered. 

The old reserve clung to her and fenced her secret in, 
36 * 


426 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


as the prickles of . a cactus-hedge may fence in the mag- 
nolia’s flowers of snow. 

“ What, then ? Have you a home ?” 

“No.” 

“ Eh 1 You must have a lover ?” 

Eolle-Fariue’s lips grew whiter, and she shrunk a little ; 
but she answered steadily, — 

“No.” 

“No I And at your age ; and handsome as a ripe, red 
apple, — with your skin of satin, and your tangle of hair I 
Fie, for shame I Are the men blind ? Where do you rest 
to-night ?” 

“ I am going on — south.” 

“ And mean to walk all night? Pooh I Come home 
with me, and sup and sleep. I live hard by, just inside 
the walls.” 

Folle-Farine opened her great eyes wide. It was the 
first creature who had ever offered her hospitality. It 
was an old woman, too ; there could be nothing but 
kindness in the offer, she thought; and kindness was 
so strange to her, that it troubled her more than did 
cruelty. 

“You are good,” she said, gratefully, — “very good; 
but I cannot come.” 

“ Cannot come ? Why, then ?’^ 

“ Because I must go on to Paris ; I cannot lose an hour. 
Nevertheless, it is good of you.” 

The old woman laughed roughly. 

“ Oh-ho 1 the red apple must go to Paris. No other 
market grand enough I Is that it?” 

“ I do not know what you mean.” 

“ But stay with me to-night. The roads are dangerous. 
There are vagrants and ill-livers about. There are great 
fogs, too, in this district ; and you will meet drunken sol- 
diers and beggars who will rob you. Come home with 
me. I have a pretty little place, though poor ; and you 
shall have such fare as I give my own daughters. And 
maybe you will see two or three of the young nobles. 
They look in for a laugh and a song — all innocent : my 
girls are favorites. Come, it is not a stone’s throw 
through the south gate.” 


folle-fa::ine. 


421 


“You are good; but I casiP.ot come. As for the 
road, I am not afraid. I have a good knife, and I am 
strong.” 

She spoke in all unconsciousness, in her heart thankful 
to this, the first human creature that had ever offered her 
shelter or good nature. 

The woman darted one sharp look at her, venomous as 
an adder’s bite ; then bade her a short good-night, and 
went on her way to the gates of the town. 

Folle-Farine rose up and walked on, taking her own 
southward road. 

She was ignorant of any peril that she had escaped. 
She did not know that the only animals which prey upon 
the young of their own sex and kind are women. 

She was very tired ; long want of sleep, anguish, and 
bodily fatigue made her dull, and too exhausted to keep 
long upon her feet. She looked about her for some place 
' of rest ; and she knew that if she did not husband her 
strength, it might fail her ere she reached him, and stretch 
her on a sick-bed in some hospital of the poor. 

She passed two or three cottages standing by the road- 
side, with light gleaming through their shutters ; but she 
did not knock at any one of them. She was afraid of 
spending her three copper coins ; and she was too proud 
to seek food or lodging as an alms. 

By-and-by she came to a little shed, standing where 
no house was. She looked into it, and saw it full of the 
last season’s hay, dry and sweet-smelling, tenanted only 
by a cat rolled round in slumber. 

She crept into it, and laid herself down and slept, the 
bright starry skies shining on her through the open space 
that served for entrance, the clatter of a little brook under 
the poplar-trees the only sound upon the quiet air. 

Footsteps went past twice or thrice, and once a wagon 
rolled lumbering by; but no one came thither to disturb 
her, and she sank into a fitful heavy sleep. 

At daybreak she was again afoot, always on the broad 
road to the southwest. 

With one of her coins she bought a loaf and a draught 
of milk, at a hamlet through which she went. She was 
surprised to find that people spoke to her without a curse 


428 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


or taunt, and dealt with her as with any other human 
being. 

Insensibly with the change of treatment, and with the 
fresh, sweet air, and with the brisk movement that bore 
her on her way, her heart grew lighter, and her old daunt- 
less spirit rose again. 

She would find him, she thought, as soon as ever she 
entered Paris ; and she would watch over him, and only 
go near him if he needed her. And then, and then 

But her thoughts went no further. She shut the future 
out from her ; it appalled her. Only one thing was clear 
before her — that she would get him the greatness that he 
thirsted for, if any payment of her body or her soul, her 
life or her death, could purchase it. 

A great purpose nerves the life it lives in, so that no 
personal terrors can assail, nor any minor woes afflict it. 
Hunger, thirst, fatigue, hardship, danger, — these were all 
in her path, and she had each in turn ; but not one of 
them unnerved her. 

To reach Paris, she felt that she would have walked 
through flames, or fasted forty days. 

For two days and nights she went on — days cloudless, 
nights fine and mild ; then came a day of storm — sharp 
hail and loud thunder. She went on through it all the 
same ; the agony in her heart made the glare of lightning 
and the roar of winds no more to her than the sigh of an 
April breeze over a primrose bank. 

She had various fortunes on her way. 

A party of tramps crossing a meadow set on her, and 
tried to insult her ; she showed them her knife, and, with 
the blade bare against her throat, made them fall back, 
and scattered them. 

A dirty and tattered group of gypsies, swatting in a dry 
ditch under a tarpaulin, hailed her, and wanted her to join 
with them and share their broken food. She eluded them 
with disgust; they were not like the gitanos of the Lie- 
bana, and she took them to be beggars and thieves, as, 
indeed, they were. 

At a little wayside cabin, a girl, with a bright rosy 
face, spoke softly and cheerily to her, and bade her rest 
awhile on the bench in the porch under the vines ; and 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


429 


brought out some white pigeons to show her ; and asked 
her, with interest, whence she came. And she, in her 
fierceness and her shyness, was touched, and wondered 
greatly that any female thing could be thus good. 

She met an old man with an organ on his back, and a 
monkey on his shoulder. He was old and infirm. She 
carried his organ for him awhile, as they went along the 
same road ; and he was gentle and kind in return, and 
made the route she had to take clear to her, and told her, 
with a shake of his head, that Paris would be either hell 
or heaven to such as she. And she, bearing, smiled a 
little, for the first time since she had left Ypres, and 
thought — heaven or hell, what would it matter which, so 
long as she found Arslan ? 

Of Dante she had never heard ; but the spirit of the 
^‘questi chi mat da me non piu diviso'’ dwells untaught 
in every great love. 

Once, at night, a vagrant tried to rob her, having 
watched her count the gold and notes which she carried 
in her girdle. He dragged her to a lonely place, and 
snatched at the red sash, grasping the money with it ; 
but she was too quick for him, and beat him off in such a 
fashion that he slunk away limping, and told his fellows 
to beware of her ; for she bad the spring of a cat, and the 
stroke of a swan’s wing. 

On the whole, the world seemed better to her than it 
had done : the men were seldom insolent, taking w^arniug 
from the look in her flashing eyes and the straight carriage 
of her flexile frame ; and the women more than once were 
kind. 

Many peasants passed her on their market-mules, and 
many carriers’ carts and farm-wagons went by along the 
sunny roads. 

Sometimes their drivers called to her to get up, and 
gave her a lift of a league or two on their piles of grass, 
of straw, or among their crates of cackling poultry, as 
they made their slow way between the lines of the trees, 
with their horses nodding heavily under the weight of 
their uncouth harness. 

All this while she never touched the gold that he had 
given her. Very little food sufiiced to her; she had 


430 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


been hardily reared ; and for the little she had she worked 
always, on her way. 

A load carried, a lost sheep fetched in, some wood 
hewn and stacked, a crying calf fed, a cabbage-patch dug 
or watered, these got her the simple fare which she fed 
on ; and for lodging she was to none indebted, preferring 
to lie down by the side of the cows in their stalls, or 
under a stack against some little blossoming garden. 

The people had no pi'cjadice against her: she found 
few foes, when she had left the district that knew the 
story of Heine Flamma; they were, on the contrary, 
amused with her strange picture-like look, and awed with 
the sad brevity of her speech to them. Sometimes it 
chanced to her to get no tasks of any sort to do, and at 
these times she went without food : touch his gold she 
would not. On the road she did what good she could ; 
she walked a needless league to carry home a child who 
had broken his leg in a lonely lane ; she sought, in a 
foggy night, for the straying goat* of a wretched old 
woman ; she saved an infant from the flames in a little 
cabin burning in the midst of the green fields : she did 
what came in her path to do. For her heart was half 
broken ; and this was her way of prayer. 

So, by tedious endeavor, she won her passage wearily 
towards Paris. 

She had been nine days on the road, losing her way at 
times, and having often wearily to retrace her steps. 

On the tenth day she came to a little town lying in a 
green hollow amidst woods. 

It had an ancient church ; the old sweet bells were 
ringing their last mid-day mass, Salutaris hostia ; a crum- 
bling fortress of the Angevine kings gave it majesty and 
shadow ; it was full of flowers and of trees, and had 
quaint, quiet, gray streets, hilly and shady, that made 
her think of the streets round about the cathedral of her 
mother’s birthplace, away northwestward in the white 
sea-mists. 

When she entered it, noon had just sounded from all 
its many clocks and chimes. The weather was hot, and 
she was very tired. She had not eaten any food, save 
some berries and green leaves, for more than forty hours. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


431 


She had been refused anything to do in all places ; and 
she had no money — except that gold of his. 

There was a little tavern, vine-shaded and bright with 
a Quatre Saisons rose that hid its casements. She asked 
there, timidl}^ if there were any task she might do, — to 
fetch water, to sweep, to break wood, to drive or to stable 
a mule or a horse. 

They took her to be a gypsy ; they ordered her roughly 
to be gone. 

Through the square 'window she could see food — a 
big juicy melon cut in halves, sweet yellow cakes, warm 
and crisp from the oven, a white chicken,^cold and dressed 
with cresses, a jug of milk, an abundance of bread. And 
her hunger was very great. 

Nine days of sharper privation than even that to which 
she had been inured in the penury of Ypres had made 
her cheeks hollow and her limbs fleshless; and a con- 
tinual consuming heat and pain gnawed at her chest. 

She sat on a bench that was free to all wayfarers, and 
looked at the food in the tavern kitchen. It tempted her 
with the terrible animal ravenousness begotten by long 
fast. She wanted to fly at it as a starved dog flies. A 
rosy-faced woman cut up the chicken on a china dish, 
singing. 

Folle-Farine, outside, looked at her, and took courage 
from her smiling face. 

“Will you give me a little work?” she murmured. 
“Anything — anything — so that I may get bread.” 

“ You are a gypsy,” answered the woman, ceasing to 
smile. “ Go to your own folk.” 

And she would not offer her even a plate of broken 
victuals. 

Folle-Farine rose and walked wearily away. She 
could not bear the sight of the food ; she felt that if she 
looked at it longer she would spring on it like a wolf. 
But to use his gold never occurred to her. She would 
have bitten her tongue through in famine ere she would 
have taken one coin of it. 

As she went, being weak from long hunger and the 
stroke of the sunrays, she stumbled and fell. She re- 
covered herself quickly ; but in the fall the money had 


432 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


shaken itself from her sash, and been scattered with a 
ringing sound upon the stones. 

The woman in the tavern window raised a loud cry I 

“ Oh-he ! the wicked liar! — to beg bread while her 
waistband is stuffed with gold like a turkey with chest- 
nuts ! What a rogue to try and dupe poor honest people 
like us 1 Take her to prison.” 

The woman cried loud ; there were half a dozen stout 
serving-wenches and stable-lads about in the little street, 
with several boys and children. Indignant at the thought 
of an attempted fraud upon their charity, and amazed at 
the flash and the fall of the money, they rushed on her 
with shrieks of rage and scorn, with missiles of turf and 
stone, with their brooms raised aloft, or their dogs set to 
rage at her. 

She had not time to gather up the coins and notes; 
she could only stand over and defend them. Two beggar- 
boys made a snatch at the tempting heap ; she drew her 
knife to daunt them with the sight of it. The people 
shrieked at sight of the bare blade; a woman selling 
honeycomb and pots of honey at a bench under a lime- 
tree raised a cry that she had been robbed. It was not 
true; but a street crowd always loves a lie, and never 
risks spoiling, by sifting, it. 

The beggar-lads and the two serving-wenches and an 
old virago from a cottage door near set upon her, and 
scrambled together to drive her away from the gold and 
share it. Resolute to defend it at any peril, she set her 
heel down on it, and, with her back against the tree, 
stood firm ; not striking, but with the point of the knife 
outward. 

One of the boys, maddened to get the gold, darted 
forward, twisted his limbs round her, and struggled with 
her for its possession. In the struggle he wounded 
himself upon the steel. His arm bled largely; he filled 
the air with his shrieks ; the people, furious, accused her 
of his murder. 

Before five minutes' had gone by she was seized, over- 
powered by numbers, cuffed, kicked, upbraided with every 
name of infamy, and dragged as a criminal up the little 
steep stony street in the blaze of the noonday sun, whilst 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


433 


on each side the townsfolk looked out from their doorways 
and their balconies and cried out : 

“ What-is it ? Oh-h5 1 A brawling gypsy, who has 
stolen something, and has stabbed poor little Freki, the 
blind man’s son, because be found her out. What is it? 
Au violon ! — au violon 

To which the groups called back again : 

“A thief of a gypsy, begging alms while she had stolen 
gold on her. She has stabbed poor little Freki, the blind 
cobbler’s son, too. We think he is dead.” And the 
people above, in horror, lifted their hands and eyes, and 
shouted afresh, ‘^Ait violon! — au violon/’^ 

Meanwhile the honey-seller ran beside them, crying 
aloud that she had been robbed of five broad golden pieces. 

It was a little sunny country-place, very green with 
trees and grass, filled usually with few louder sounds than 
the cackling of geese and the dripping of the well-water. 

But its stones were sharp and rough ; its voices were 
shrill and fierce ; its gossips were cruel and false of tongue; 
its justice was very small, and its credulity was measure- 
less. A girl, barefoot and bareheaded, with eyes of the 
East, and a knife in her girdle, teeth that met in their 
youngsters’ wrist, and gold pieces that scattered like dust 
from her bosom, — such a one could have no possible inno- 
cence in their eyes, such a one was condemned so soon as 
she was looked at when she was dragged among them up 
their hilly central way. 

She had had money on her, and she had asked for food 
on the plea of being starved ; that was fraud plain enough, 
even for those who were free to admit that the seller of 
the honey-pots had never been overtrue of speech, and 
had never owned so much as five gold pieces ever since 
her first bees had sucked their first spray of heath-bells. 

No one had any mercy on a creature who had money, 
and yet asked for work ; as to her guilt, there could be no 
question. 

She was hurried before the village tribune, and cast 
with horror into the cell where all accused waited their 
judgment. 

It was a dusky, loathsome place, dripping with damp, 
half underground strongly grilled with iron, and smelling 

37 


434 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


foully from the brandy and strong smoke of two drunk- 
ards who had been its occupants the previous night. 

There they left her, taking away her knife and her 
money. 

She did not resist. .It was not her nature to rebel 
futilely ; and they had fallen on her six to one, and had 
bound her safely with cords ere they had dragged her 
away to punishment. 

The little den was visible to the highway through a 
square low grating. Through this they came and stared, 
and mouthed, and mocked, and taunted, and danced before 
her. To bait a gypsy was fair pastime. 

Everywhere, from door to door, the blind cobbler, with 
his little son, and the woman who sold honey told their 
tale, — how she had stabbed the little lad and stolen the 
gold that the brave bees had brought their mistress, and 
begged for food when she had had money enough on her 
to buy a rich man’s feast. It was a tale to enlist against 
her all the hardest animosities of the poor. The village 
rose against her in all its little homes as though she had 
borne fire and sword into its midst. 

If the arm of the law had not guarded the entrance of 
her prison-cell, the women would have stoned her to 
death, or dragged her out to drown in the pond : — she 
was worse than a murderess in their sight ; and one 
weak man, thinking to shelter her a little from their rage, 
quoted against her her darkest crime when he pleaded for 
mercy for her because she was young and was so hand- 
some. 

The long hot day of torment passed slowly by. 

Outside there were cool woods, flower-filled paths, broad 
fields of grass, children tossing blow-balls down the wind, 
lovers counting the leaves of yellow-eyed autumn daisies ; 
but within there were only foul smells, intense nausea, 
cruel heats, the stings of a thousand insects, the buzz of 
a hundred carrion-flies, muddy water, and black mouldy 
bread. 

She held her silence. She would not let her enemies 
see that they hurt her. 

When the day had gone down, and the people had tired 
of their sport and left her a little while, an old feeble man 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


435 


stole timidly to her, glancing round lest any should see 
his charity and quote it as a crime, and tendered her 
through the bars with a gentle hand a little ripe autumnal 
fruit upon a cool green leaf. 

The kindness made the tears start to eyes too proud to 
weep for pain. 

She took the peaches and thanked him lovingly and 
gratefully; cooled her aching, burning, dust-drenched 
throat with their fragrant moisture. 

“ Hush I it is nothing,” he whispered, frightenedly, 
glancing over his shoulder lest any one should see. “ But 
tell me — tell me — why did you say you starved when you 
had all that gold ?” 

“ I did starve,” she answered him. 

“ But why — with all that gold ?” 

“ It was another’s.” 

The old man stared at her, trembling and amazed. 

“ What — what 1 die of hunger and keep your hands off 
money in your girdle ?” 

A dreary smile came on her face. 

‘‘ What! is that inhuman too ?” 

“Inhuman?” he murmured. “Oh, child — oh, child, 
tell any tale you will, save such a tale as that 1” 

And he stole away sorrowful, because sure that for his 
fruit of charity she had given him back a lie. 

He shambled away, afraid that his neighbors should 
see the little thing which he had done. 

She was left alone. 

It began to grow dark. She felt scorched with fever, 
and her head throbbed. Long hunger, intense fatigue, 
and all the agony of thought in which she had struggled 
on her way, had their reaction on her. She shivered 
where she sat on the damp straw which they had cast 
upon the stones ; and strange noises sang in her ears, and 
strange lights glimmered and flashed before her eyes. 
She did not know what ailed her. 

The dogs came and smelt at her, and one little early 
robin sang a twilight song in an elder-bush near. These 
were the only things that had any pity on her. 

By-and-by, when it was quite night, they opened the 
grated door and thrust in another captive, a vagrant they 


436 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


had found drunk or delirious on the highroad, whom 
they locked up for the night, that on the morrow they 
might determine what to do with him. 

He threw himself heavily forward as he was pushed in 
by the old soldier whose place it was to guard the miser- 
able den. 

She shrank away into the farthest corner of the den, 
and crouched there, breathing heavil}^ and staring with 
dull, dilated eyes. 

She thought, — surely they could not mean to leave 
them there alone, all the night through, in the horrible 
darkness. 

The slamming of the iron door answered her; and the 
old soldier, as he turned the rusty key in the lock, grum- 
bled that the world was surely at a pretty pass, when two 
tramps became too coy to roost together. And he stum- 
bled up the ladder-like stairs of the guard-house to his own 
little chamber ; and there, smoking and drinking, and 
playing dominoes with a comrade, dismissed his prisoners 
from his recollection. 

Meanwhile, the man whom he had thrust into the cell 
was stretched where he had fallen, drunk or insensible, 
and moaning heavily. 

She, crouching against the wall, as though praying the 
stones to yield and hold her, gazed at him with horror 
and pity that together strove in the confusion of her dizzy 
brain, and made her dully wonder whether she were 
wicked thus to shrink in loathing from a creature in dis- 
tress so like her own. 

The bright moon rose on the other side of the trees 
beyond the grating ; its light fell across the figure of the 
vagrant whom they had locked in with her, as in the 
wild-beast shows of old they locked a lion with an ante- 
lope in the same cage — out of sport. 

She saw the looming massive shadow of an immense 
form, couched like a crouching beast ; she saw the fice of 
burning, wide-open, sullen eyes ; she saw the restless, 
feeble gesture of two lean hands, that clutched at the bar- 
ren stones with the futile action of a chained vulture 
clutching at his rock ; she saw that the man suffered hor- 
ribly, and she tried to pity him— tried not to shrink from 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


m 


him — tried to tell herself that he might be as guiltless as 
was herself. But she could not prevail : nature, instinct, 
youth, sex, sickness, exhaustion, all conquered her, and 
broke her strength. She recoiled from the unbearable 
agony of that horrible probation ; she sprang to the grated 
aperture, and seized the iron in her hands, and shook it 
with all her might, and tore at it, and bruised her chest 
and arms against it, and clung to it convulsively, shriek 
after shriek pealing from her lips. 

No one heard, or no one answered to her prayer. 

A stray dog came and howled in unison ; the moon 
sailed on behind the trees ; the old soldier above slept 
over his toss of brandy ; at the only dwelling near they 
were dancing at a bridal, and had no ear to hear. 

The passionate outcries wailed themselves to silence 
on her trembling mouth ; her strained hands gave way 
from their hold on the irons ; she grew silent from sheer 
exhaustion, and dropped in a heap at the foot of the iron 
door, clinging to it, and crushed against it, and turning 
her face to the night without, feeling some little sense of 
solace in the calm clear moon ; — some little sense of com- 
fort in the mere presence of the dog. 

Meanwhile the dusky prostrate form of the man had 
not stirred. 

He had not spoken, save to curse heaven and earth and 
every living thing. He had not ceased to glare at her 
with eyes that had the red light of a tiger’s in their pain. 
He was a man of superb stature and frame ; he was 
worn by disease and delirium, but he had in him a wild, 
leonine tawny beauty still. His clothes were of rags, 
and his whole look was of wretchedness ; yet there was 
about him a certain reckless majesty and splendor still, 
as the scattered beams of the white moonlight broke 
themselves upon him. 

Of a sudden he spoke aloud, with a glitter of terrible 
laughter on his white teeth and his flashing eyes. He 
was delirious, and had no consciousness of where he was. 

“ The fourth bull I had killed that Easter-day. Look I 
do you see ? It was a red Andalusian. He had wounded 
three picadors, and ripped the bellies of eight horses, — 
a brave bull, but I was one too many for him. She was 

37 * 


438 


FOLLE-FARTNE. 


there. All the winter she had flouted over and taunted 
me ; all the winter she had cast her scorn at me — the 
beautiful brown thing, with her cruel eyes. But she was 
there when I slew the great red bull — straight above 
there, looking over her fan. Do you see ? And when 
my sword went up to the hilt in his throat, and the brave 
blood spouted, she laughed such a little sweet laugh, and 
cast her yellow jasmine flower at me, down in the blood 
and the sand there. And that night, after the red bull 
died, the rope was thrown from the balcony 1 So — so 1 
Only a year ago ; only a year ago P' 

Then he laughed loud again ; and, laughing, sang — 

“Avez-vous vu en Bareelonne 
Une belle dame, au sein bruni, 

Pale comme un beau soir d’automne? 

C’est ma maitresse, ma lionne, 

La Marchesa d’Amagui." 


The rich, loud challenge of the love-song snapped short 
in two. With a groan and a curse he flung himself on 
the mud floor, and clutched at it with his empty hands. 

“ Wine I — wine I” he moaned, lying athirst there as the 
red bull had lain on the sands of the circus ; longing for 
the purple draughts of his old feast-nights, as the red bull 
had longed for the mountain streams, so cold and strong, 
of its own Andalusian birthplace. 

Then he laughed again, and sang old songs of Spain, 
broken and marred by discord — their majestic melodies 
wedded strangely to many a stave of lewd riot and of 
amorous verse. 

Then for awhile he was quiet, moaning dully, staring 
upward at the white face of the moon. 

After awhile he mocked it — the cold, chaste thing that 
was the meek trickster of so many mole-eyed lords. 

Through the terror and the confusion of her mind, 
with the sonorous melody of the tongue, with the flaming 
darkness of the eyes, with the wild barbaric dissolute 
grandeur of this shattered manhood, vague memories 
floated, distorted and intangible, before her. Of deep 
forests whose shade was cool even in midsummer and at 
mid-day; of glancing torrents rushing through their 


FOLLE-FARINE, 


439 


beds of stone ; of mountain snows flashing in sunset to all 
the hues of the roses that grew in millions by the river- 
water ; of wondrous nights, sultry and serene, in which 
women with flashing glances and bare breasts danced 
with their spangled anklets glittering in the rays of the 
moon ; of roofless palaces where the crescent still glis- 
tened on the colors of the walls ; of marble pomps, empty 
and desolate, where only the oleander held pomp and the 
wild fig-vine held possession ; of a dead nation which at 
midnight thronged through the desecrated halls of its 
kings and passed in shadowy hosts through the fated 
land which had rejected the faith and the empire of Islam ; 
sowing as they went upon the blood-soaked soil the 
vengeance of the dead in pestilence, in feud, in anarchy, 
in barren passions, in endless riot and revolt, so that no 
sovereign should sit in peace on the ruined throne of the 
Moslem, and no light shine ever again upon the people 
whose boast it once had been that on them the sun in 
heaven never set all these memories floated before her 
and only served to make her fear more ghastly, her hor- 
ror more unearthly. 

There he lay delirious — a madman chained at her feet, 
so close in the little den that, shrink as she would 
against the wall, she could barely keep from the touch of 
his hands as they were flung forth in the air, from the 
scorch of his breath as he raved and cursed. 

And there was no light except the fire in his fierce, hot 
eyes ; except the flicker of the moonbeam through the 
leaves. 

She spent her strength in piteous shrieks. They were 
the first cries that had ever broken from her lips for 
human aid ; and they were vain. 

The guard above slept heavy with brandy and a 
dotard’s dreams. The village was not aroused. What 
cared any of its sleepers how these outcasts fared ? 

She crouched in the farthest corner, when her agony 
had spent itself in the passion of appeal. 

The night — would it ever end ? 

Besides its horror, all the wretchedness and bondage 
of her old life seemed like peace and freedom. 

Writhing in his pain and frenzy, the wounded drunk- 


440 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


ard struck her — all unconscious of the blow — across her 
eyes, and fell, contorted and senseless, with his head upon 
her knees. 

He had ceased to shout his amorous songs, and vaunt 
his lustful triumphs. His voice was hollow in his throat, 
and babbled with a strange sound, low and fast and in- 
articulate. 

“In the little green wood — in the little green wood,” 
he muttered. “ Hark! do you hear the mill-water run ? 
She looked so white and so cold ; and they all called her 
a saint. What could a man do but kill that ? Does she 
cry out against me? You say so? You lie. You lie 
— be you devil or god. You sit on a great white throne 
and judge us all. So they say. You can send us to hell ? 
. . . . Well, do. You shall never wring a word 

from her to my hurt. She thinks I killed the child ? 
Nay — that I swear. Phratos knew, I think. But he is 

dead ; — so they say. Ask him My brown 

queen, who saw me kill the red bull, — are you there too ? 
Ay. How the white jewels shine in your breast ! 
Stoop a little, and kiss me. So I Your mouth burns; 
and the yellow jasmine flower — there is a snake in it. 
Look! You love me? — oh-ho ! — what does 3mur priest 
say, and your lord ? Love ! — so many of you swore that. 
But she, — she, standing next to her god there, — I hurt 
her most, and yet she alone of you all says nothing!” 

When, at daylight, the people unbarred the prison-door, 
they found the sightless face of the dead man lying full 
in the light of the sun : beside him the girl crouched with 
a senseless stare in the horror of her eyes, and on her lips 
a ghastly laugh. 

For Folle-Farine had entered at length into her 
Father’s kingdom. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


441 


CHAPTER yill. 

For many months she knew nothing of the flight of 
time. All she was conscious of were burning intolerable 
pain, continual thirst, and the presence of as an iron hand 
upon her head, weighing down the imprisoned brain. All 
she saw in the horrible darkness, which no ray of light 
ever broke, was the face of Thanatos, with the white rose 
pressed against his mouth, to whom endlessly she 
stretched her arms in vain entreaty, but who said only, 
with the passionless pity of his gaze, “ I come in my 
own time, and neither tarry nor hasten for any supplica- 
tion of a mortal creature.’’ 

She lived as a reed torn up from the root may live by 
the winds that waft it, by the birds that carry it, by the 
sands that draw its fibers down into themselves, to root 
afresh whether it will or no. 

“ The reed was worthy to die ! — the reed was worthy 
to die I” was all that she said, again and again, lying 
staring with her hot distended eyes into the void as of 
perpetual night, which was all that she saw around her. 
The words were to those who heard her, however, the 
mere meaningless babble of madness. 

When they had found her in the cell of the guard- 
house, she was far beyond any reach of harm from them, 
or any sensibility of the worst which they might do to 
her. She was in a delirious stupor, which left her no 
more sense of place, or sound, or time than if her brain 
had been drugged to the agonies and ecstasies of the 
opium-eater. 

They found her homeless, friendless, nameless ; a 
thing accursed, destitute, unknown; as useless and as 
rootless as the dead Spanish vagrant lying on the stones 
beside her. They cast him to the public ditch ; they 
sent her to the public sick wards, a league away ; an 
ancient palace, whose innumerable chambers and whose 


442 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


vast corridors had been given to a sisterhood of mercy, 
and employed for nigh a century as a public hospital. 

In this prison she lay without any sense of the passing 
of hours and days and months. 

The accusation against her fell to the ground harm- 
less ; no one pursued it : the gold was gone — somewhere, 
nowhere. No one knew, unless it were the bee-wife, and 
she held her peace. 

She was borne, senseless, to the old hospice in the 
great, dull, saintly, historic town, and there perished " 
from all memories as all time perished to her. 

Once or twice the sister of charity who had the charge 
of her sought to exorcise the demon tormenting this 
stricken brain and burning body, by thrusting into the 
hands that clinched the air a leaden image or a cross of 
sacred wood. But those heathen hands, even in delirium, 
threw those emblems away always, and the captive would 
mutter in a vague incoherence that froze the blood of her 
hearers : 

“ The old gods are not dead ; they only wait — they 
only wait I I am theirs — theirs I They forget, perhaps. 
But I remember. I keep my faith ; they must keep theirs, 
for shame’s sake. Heaven or hell ? what does it matter ? 
Can it matter to me, so that he has his desire ? And 
that they must give, or break faith, as men do. Perse- 
phone ate the pomegranate, — you know — and she went 
back to hell. So will I — if they will it. What can it 
matter how the reed dies ? — by fire, by steel, by storm ? 
— what matter, so that the earth hear the music? Ah, 
God 1 the reed was found worthy to die I And I — I am 
too vile, too poor, too shameful even for that /’^ 

And then her voice would rise in a passion of hysteric 
weeping, or sink away into the feeble wailing of the 
brain, mortally stricken and yet dimly sensible of its own 
madness and weakness ; and all through the hours she, 
in her unconsciousness, would lament for this — for this 
alone — that the gods had not deemed her worthy of the 
stroke of death by which, through her, a divine melody 
might have arisen, and saved the world. 

For the fable — which had grown to hold the place of 
so implicit a faith to her — was in her delirium always 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


443 


present with her ; and she had retained no sense of her- 
self except as the bruised and trampled reed which man 
and the gods alike had rejected as unworthy of sacrifice. 

All the late autumn and the early winter came and 
went; and the cloud was dark upon her mind, and the 
pain of the blow dealt to her by Taric’s hand gnawed at 
her brain. 

When the winter turned, the darkness in which her 
reason had been engulfed began to clear, little by little. 

As the first small trill of the wren stirred the silence 
in the old elm-boughs ; as the first feeble gleam of the 
new-year sunshine struggled through the matted branches 
of the yews ; as the first frail blossom of the pale hepatica 
timidly peeped forth in the damp moss-grown walls with- 
out, so consciousness slowly returned to her. She was so 
young ; the youth in her refused to be quenched, and re- 
covered its hold upon life as did the song of the birds, 
the light in the skies, the corn in the seed-sown earth. 

She awakened to strength, to health, to knowledge ; 
though she awoke thus blinded and confused and capable 
of little save the sense of some loathsome bondage, of 
some irreparable loss, of some great duty which she had 
left undone, of some great errand to which she had been 
summoned, and found wanting. 

She saw four close stone walls around her ; she saw 
her wrists and her ankles bound ; she saw a hole high 
up above her head, braced with iron bars, which served 
to let in a few pallid streaks of daylight which alone ever 
found their way thither ; she saw a black cross in one 
corner, and before it two women in black, who prayed. 

She tried to rise, and could not, being fettered. She 
tore at the rope on her wrists with her teeth, like a young 
tigress at her chains. 

They essayed to soothe her, but in vain; they then 
made trial first of threats, then of coercion ; neither af- 
fected her; she bit at the knotted cords with her white, 
strong teeth, and, being unable to free herself, fell back- 
ward in a savage despair, glaring in mute impotent rage 
upon her keepers. 

“ I must go to Paris,” she muttered again and again. 

I must go to Paris.” 


444 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


So much escaped her;~but her secret she was still 
strong to keep buried in silence in her heart, as she had 
still kept it even in her madness. 

Her old strength, her old patience, her old ferocity and 
stubbornness and habits of mute resistance, had revived 
in her with the return of life and reason. Slowly she 
remembered all things — remembered that she had been 
accused and hunted down as a thief and brought thither 
into this prison, as she deemed it, where the closeness 
of the walls pent her in and shut out the clouds and the 
stars, the water and the moonri.se, the flicker of the 
green leaves against the gold of sunset, and all the liberty 
and loveliness of earth and air for which she was devoured 
by a continual thirst of longing, like the thirst of the caged 
lark for the fair heights of heaven. 

So when they spoke of their god, she answered always 
as the lark answers when his jailers speak to him of 
song : — “ Set me free.” 

But they thought this madness no less, and kept her 
bound there in the little dark stone den, where no sound 
ever reached, unless it were the wailing of a bell, and no 
glimpse of the sky or the trees could ever come to charm 
to peaceful rest her aching eyes. 

At length they grew afraid of what they did. She re- 
fused all food ; she turned her face to the wall ; she 
stretched herself on her bed of straw motionless and 
rigid. The confinement, the absence of air, were a living 
death to the creature whose lungs were stifled unless 
they drank in the fresh cool draught of winds blowing 
unchecked over the width of the fields and forests, and 
whose eyes ached and grew blind unless they could gaze 
into the depths of free-flowing water, or feed themselves 
in far-reaching sight upon the radiant skies. 

The errant passions in her, the inborn instincts towards 
perpetual liberty, and the life of the desert and of the 
mountains which came with the blood of the Zingari, 
made her prison-house a torture to her such as is un- 
known to the house-born and hearth-fettered races. 

If this wild moorbird died of self-imposed famine rather 
than live only to beat its cut wings against the four walls 
of their pent prison-house, it might turn ill for them- 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


445 


selves ; so the religious community meditated. They 
became afraid of their own work. 

One day they said to her : 

“ Eat and live, and you will be set free to-morrow.” 

She turned for the first time, and lifted her face from 
the straw in which she buried it, and looked them in the 
eyes. 

“ Is that true ?” she asked. 

“ Ay,” they answered her. “ We swear it by the cross 
of our blessed Master.” 

“ If a Christian swear it, — it must be a lie,” she said, 
with the smile that froze their timid blood. 

But she accepted the food and the drink which they 
brought her, and broke her fast, and slept through many 
hours ; strengthened, as by strong wine, by that one hope 
of freedom beneath the wide pure, skies. 

She asked them on awakening what the season of the 
year was then. They told her it was the early spring. 

“ The spring,” she echoed dully, — all the months were 
a blank to her, which had rolled by since that red autumn 
evening when in the cell of the guard-house the voice of 
Taric had chanted in drink and delirium the passion 
songs of Spain. 

“ Yes. It is spring,” they said again ; and one sister, 
younger and gentler than the rest, reached from its place 
above the crucifix the bough of the golden catkins of the 
willow, which served them at their holy season as an 
emblem of the palms of Palestine. 

She looked at the drooping grace of the branches, with 
their buds of amber, long and in silence; then with a 
passion of weeping she turned her face from them as from 
the pre.sence of some intolerable memory. 

All down the shore of the river, amongst the silver of 
the reeds, the willows had been in blossom when she had 
first looked upon the face of Arshtn. 

“ Stay with us,” the women murmured, drawn to her 
by the humanity of those the first tears that she had 
ever shed in her imprisonment. “ Stay with us ; and it 
shall go hard if we cannot find a means to bring you to 
eternal peace.” 

She shook her head wearily. 

38 


446 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


“It is not peace that I seek,” she murmured. 

Peace ? 

He would care nothing for peace on earth or in heaven, 
she knew. What she had sought to gain for him — what 
she would seek still when once she should get free — was 
the eternal conflict of a great fame in the world of men ; 
since this was the only fate which in his sight had any 
grace or any glory in it. 

They kept their faith with her. They opened the doors 
of her prison-house and bade her depart in peace, pagan 
and criminal though they deemed her. 

She reeled a little dizzily as the first blaze of the full 
daylight fell on her. She walked out with unsteady 
steps into the open air where they took her, and felt it 
cool and fresh upon her cheek, and saw the blue sky 
above her. 

The gates which they unbarred were those at the back 
of the hospital, where the country stretched around. 
They did not care that she should be seen by the people 
of the streets. 

She was left alone on a road outside the great building 
that had been her prison-house ; the road was full of light, 
it was straight and shadowless; there was a tall tree 
near her full of leaf ; there was a little bird fluttering in 
the sand at her feet; the ground was wet, and sparkled 
with rain-drops. 

All the little things came to her like the notes of a song 
heard far away — far away — in another world. They were 
all so familiar, yet so strange. 

There was a little yellow flower growing in a tuft of 
grasses straight in front of her ; a little wayside weed ; 
a root and blossom of the field-born celandine. 

She fell on her knees in the dust by it, and laughed 
and wept, and, quivering, kissed it and blessed it that it 
grew there. It was the first thing of summer and of 
sunshine that she had seen for so long. 

A man in the gateway saw her, and shook her, and 
bade her get from the ground. 

“ You are fitter to go back again,” he muttered; “you 
are mad still, I think.” 

Like a hunted animal she stumbled to her feet and fled 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


447 


from him ; winged by the one ghastly terror that they 
would claim her and chain her back again. 

They had said that she was free : but what were words ? 
They had taken her once ; they might take her twice. 

She ran, and ran, and ran. 

The intense fear that possessed her lent her irresistible 
force. She coursed the earth with the swiftness of a 
hare. She took no heed whence she went; she only 
knew that she fled from that one unutterable horror of 
the place. She thought that they were right ; that she 
was mad. 

It was a level, green, silent country which was round 
her, with little loveliness and little color; but as she 
went she laughed incessantly in the delirious gladness of 
her liberty. 

She tossed her head back to watch the flight of a sin- 
gle swallow ; she caught a handful of green leaves and 
buried her face in them. She listened in a very agony 
of memory to the rippling moisture of a little brook. 
She followed with her eyes the sweeping vapors of the 
rain-clouds, and when a west wind rose and blew a clus- 
ter of loose apple-blossoms between her eyes, she could 
no longer bear the passionate pain of all the long-lost 
sweetness, but, flinging herself downward, sobbed with 
the ecstasy of an exile’s memories. 

The 'hell in which she had dwelt had denied them to 
her for so long. 

“Ah, God I” she thought, “I know now — one cannot 
be utterly wretched whilst one has still the air and the 
light and the winds of the sky.” 

And she arose, calmer, and went on her way ; wonder- 
ing, even in that hour, why men and women trod the 
daily measures of their lives with their eyes downward, 
and their ears choked with the dust, hearkening so little to 
the sound of the breeze in the grasses, looking so little 
to the passage of the clouds against the sun. 

When the first blindness and rapture of her liberty had 
a little passed away, and abated in violence, she stood in 
the midst of the green fields and the fresh woods, a 
strange, sad, lonely figure of absolute desolation. 

Her clothes were in rags ; her red girdle had been 


448 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


changed by weather to a dusky purple ; her thick cluster- 
ing hair had been cut to her throat ; her radiant hues 
were blanched, and her immense eyes gazed woefully 
from beneath their heavy dreamy lids, like the eyes of an 
antelope whom men vainly starve in the attempt to 
tame. 

She knew neither where to go nor what to do. She 
had not a coin nor a crust upon her. She could not tell 
where she then stood, nor where the only home that she 
had ever known might lie. 

She had not a friend on earth; and she was seventeen 
years old, and was beautiful, and was a woman. 

She stood and looked ; she did not weep ; she did not 
pray ; her heart seemed frozen in her. She had the gift 
she had craved, — and how could she use it ? 

The light was obscured by clouds, great, sweet rain- 
clouds which came trooping from the west. Woods were 
all round, and close against her were low brown cattle, 
cropping clovered grass. Away on the horizon was a 
vague, vast, golden cloud, like a million threads of gos- 
samer glowing in the sun. 

She did not know what it was ; yet it drew her eyes 
to it. She thought of the palaces. 

A herdsman came by her to the cattle. She pointed 
to the cloud. 

“ What is that light ?” she asked him. 

The cowherd stared and laughed. 

“ That light ? It is only the sun shining on the domes 
and the spires of Paris.” 

“ Paris I” 

She echoed the name with a great sob, and crossed 
her hands upon her breast, and in her way thanked God. 

She had had no thought that she could be thus near to it. 

She asked no more, but set straight on her way thither. 
It looked quite close. 

She had exhausted the scanty strength which she had 
in her first flight; she could go but slowly; and the 
roads were heavy across the plowed lands, and through 
the edges of the woods. She walked on and on till it 
grew dusk, then she asked of a woman weeding in a field 
how far it might be yet to Paris. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


449 


The woman told her four leagues and more. 

She grew deadly cold with fear. She was weak, and 
she had no hope that she could reach it before dawn ; 
and she had nothing with which to buy shelter for the 
night. She could see it still ; a cloud, now as of fireflies, 
upon the purple and black of the night ; and in a pas- 
sionate agony of longing she once more bent her limbs 
and ran — thinking of him. 

To her the city of the world, the city of the kings, the 
city of the eagles, was only of value for the sake of this 
one life it held. 

It was useless. All the strength she possessed was 
already spent. The feebleness of fever still sang in her 
ears and trembled in her blood. She was sick and faint, 
and very thirsty. 

She struck timidly at a little cottage door, and asked 
to rest the night there. 

The woman glanced at her and slammed to the door. 
At another and yet another she tried ; but at neither had 
she any welcome ; they muttered of the hospitals and 
drove her onward. Finally, tired out, she dropped down 
on the curled hollow of an old oak stump that stood 
by the wayside, and fell asleep, seeing to the last through 
her sinking lids that cloud of light where the great city 
lay. 

The night was cold ; the earth damp ; she stretched her 
limbs out wearily and sighed, and dreamed that Thanatos 
touched her with his asphodels and whispered, “ Come.’^ 


38 * 


450 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


CHAPTER IX. 

When she awoke she was no longer in the open air by 
the roadside, and the gray of the falling night about her, 
and the wet leaves for her bed. She was in a wide 
painted chamber, sweet with many roses, hung with deep 
hues of violet, filled with gold and color and sculpture 
and bronze, duskily beautiful and dimly lighted by a 
great wood fire that glowed upon andirons of brass. 

On the wall nearest her hung all alone a picture, — a 
picture of a girl asleep in a scarlet blaze of poppies, above 
her head a purple butterfly, and on her breast the Red 
Mouse of the Brocken. 

Opposite to it, beside the hearth, watching her with 
his small brilliant eyes, and quite motionless, sat the old 
man Sartorian, who had kept his faith with her, though 
the gods had not kept theirs. 

And the picture and the reality grew confused before 
her, and she knew not which was "herself and which her 
painted likeness, nor which was the little red mouse 
that gibbered among the red flowers, and which the 
little old man who sat watching her with the fire-gleams 
bright in his eyes ; and it seemed to her that she and the 
picture were one, and he and the mouse were one like- 
wise ; and she moaned and leaned her head on her hands 
and tried to think. 

The heat of the chamber, and the strong nourishment 
which they had poured down her throat when she was 
insensible of anything they did to her, had revived the 
life in her. Memory and sense returned slowly to her ; 
what first awakened was her one passionate desire, so in- 
tense that it became an instinct stifling every other, to go 
on her way to the city that had flashed in its golden glory 
on her sight one moment, only the next to disappear into 
the eternal night. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


451 


** Paris I’’ she muttered, mechanically, as she lifted her 
face with a hopeless, bewildered prayer. 

“ Tell me the way to Paris,” she muttered, instinct- 
ively, and she tried to rise and walk, not well knowing 
what she did. 

The old man laughed a little, silently. 

“ Ah-h-h ! Women are the only peaches that roll of their 
own accord from the wall to the wasp’s nest 1” 

At the saund of his voice her eyes opened wide upon 
him ; she knew his face again. 

“Where am I V’ she asked him, with a sharp terror in 
her voice. 

“ In my house,” he said, simply. “ I drove by you 
when you lay on the roadside. I recognized you. When 
people dream of immortality they generally die in a ditch. 
You would have died of a single night out there. I sent 
my people for you. You did not wake. You have slept 
here five hours.” 

“ Is this Rioz?” She could not comprehend; a horror 
seized her, lest she should have strayed from Paris back 
into her mother’s province. 

“ No. It is another home of mine ; smaller, but choicer 
maybe. Who has cut your hair close ?” 

She shuddered and turned paler with the memory of 
that ghastly prison-house. 

“Well; I am not sure but that you are handsomer, — 
almost. A sculptor would like you more now, — what a 
head you would make for an Anteros, or an Icarus, or a 
Hyacinthusl Yes — you are best so. You have been 
ill?” 

She could not answer ; she only stared at him, blankly, 
with sad, mindless, dilated eyes. 

“A little gold !” she muttered, “ a little gold !” 

He looked at her awhile, then rose and went and sent 
his handwomen, who took her to an inner chamber, and 
bathed and attended her with assiduous care. She was 
stupefied, and knew not what they did. 

They served her tenderly. They bathed her tired limbs 
and laid her, as gently as though she were some wounded 
royal captive, upon a couch of down. 

She had no force to resist. Her eyes were heavy, and 


452 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


her senses were obscured. The potence of the draught 
which they had forced through her lips, when she had 
been insensible, acted on her as an anodyne. She sank 
back unconsciously, and she slept again, all through the 
night and half the day that followed. 

Through all the hours she was conscious at intervals 
of the fragrance of flowers, of the gleams of silver and 
gold, of the sounds of distant music, of the white, calm 
gaze of marble fauns and dryads, who gazed gn her from 
amidst the coolness of hanging foliage. She who had 
never rested on any softer couch than her truss of hay or 
heap of bracken, dreamed that she slept on roses. The 
fragrance of innumerable flowers breathed all around her. 
A distant music came through the silence on her drowsy 
ear. For the first time in her life of toil and pain she 
knew how exquisite a pleasure mere repose can be. 

At noon she awoke, crying aloud that the Red Mouse 
claimed her soul from.Thanatos. 

When her vision cleared, and her dream passed away, 
the music, the flowers, the color, the coolness, were all 
real around her. She was lying on a couch as soft as the 
rose-beds of Sybaris. About her were the luxuries and 
the graces amidst which the rich dwell. Above her head, 
from a golden height, a painted Eros smiled. 

The light, on to which her startled eyes opened, came 
to her veiled through soft, rosy hues; the blossom of 
flowers met her everywhere ; gilded lattices, and precious 
stones, and countless things for which she knew neither 
the name nor use, and wondrous plants, with birds like 
living blossoms on the wing above them, and the marble 
heads of women, rising cold and pure above the dreamy 
shadows, all the color, and the charm, and the silence, 
and the grace of the life that is rounded by wealth were 
around her. 

She lay silent and breathless awhile, with wide-open 
eyes, motionless from the languor of her weakness and 
the confusion of her thoughts, wondering dully, whether 
she belonged to the hosts of the living or the dead. 

She was in a small sleeping-thamber, in a bed like the 
cup of a lotos ; there was perfect silence round her, ex- 
cept for the faint far-off echo of some music ; a drowsy 


FOLLE-FARINE, 


453 


subtle fragrance filled the air, the solemn measure of a 
clock’s pendulum deepened the sense of stillness ; for the 
first time in her life she learned how voluptuous a thing 
the enjoyment of simple rest can be. All her senses 
were steeped in it, lulled by it, magnetized by it ; and, 
so far as every thought was conscious to her, she thought 
that this was death — death amidst the fields of asphodel, 
and in the eternal peace of the realm of Thanatos. 

Suddenly. her eyes fell on a familiar thing, a little pic- 
ture close at hand, the picture of herself amidst the 
poppies. 

She leapt from her bed and fell before it, and clasped 
it in her arms, and wept over it and kissed it, because it 
had been the work of his hand, and prayed to the un- 
known gods to make her suffer all things in his stead, 
and to give him the desire of his soul. And the Red 
Mouse had no power on her, because of her great love. 

She rose from that prayer with, her mind clear, and 
her nerves strung from the lengthened repose ; she re- 
membered all that had chanced to her. 

“ Where are my clothes?” she muttered to the serving- 
woman who watched beside her. “ It is broad day ; — I 
must go on ; — to Paris.” 

They craved her to wear the costly and broidered 
stuffs strewn around her ; masterpieces of many an East- 
ern and Southern loom ; but she put them all aside in 
derision and impatience, drawing around her with a 
proud loving action the folds of her own poor garments. 
Weather-stained, torn by bush and brier, soaked with 
night-dew, and discolored by the dye of many a crushed 
flower and bruised berry of the fields and woods, she yet 
would not have exchanged these poor shreds of woven 
flax and goats’ wool against imperial robes, for, poor 
though they were, they were the symbols of her inde- 
pendence and her liberty. 

The women tended her gently, and pressed on her 
many rare and fair things, but she would not have them ; 
she took a cup of milk, and passed out into the larger 
chamber. 

She was troubled and bewildered, but she had no fear ; 
for she was too innocent, too wearied, and too desperate 


454 


FOLLE-FARINE. 




with that deathless courage, which, having borne the 
worst that fate can do, can know no dread. 

She stood with her arms folded on her breast, drawing 
together the tattered folds of the tunic, gazing at the 
riches and the luxury, and the blended colors of the 
room. So softly that she never heard his footfall, the 
old man entered behind her, and came to the hearth, and 
looked on her. 

“You are better he asked. “ Are you better, Folle- 
Farine 

She looked up, and met the eyes of Sartorian. They 
smiled again on her with the smile of the Red Mouse. 

The one passion which consumed her was stronger 
than any fear or any other memory : she only thought 
this man must know ? 

She sprang forward and grasped his arm with both 
hands, with the seizure of a tigress ; her passionate eyes 
searched his face ; her voice came hard and fast. 

“What have you done? — is he living or dead? — you 
must know ?” 

His eyes still smiled : 

“ I gave him his golden key ; — how he should use it, 
that was not in our bond ? But, truly, I will make 
another bond with you any day, Folle-Farine.” 

She shuddered, and her hands dropped from their hold. 

“ You know nothing?” she murmured. 

“ Of your Norse god ? nay, nothing. An eagle soars too 
high for a man’s sight to follow, you know — oftentimes.” 

And he laughed his little soft laugh. 

The eagles often soared so high — so high — that the 
icy vapors of the empyrean froze them dead, and they 
dropped to earth a mere bruised, helpless, useless mass : 
— he knew. 

She stood stunned and confused: her horror of Sarto- 
rian was struggling into life through the haze in which 
all things of the past were still shrouded to her dulled 
remembrance — all things, save her love. 

“ Rest awhile,” he said, gently. “ Rest; and we may 
— who knows ? — learn something of your Northern god. 
First, tell me of yourself. I have sought for tidings of 
you vainly.” 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


455 


Her eyes glanced round her on every side. 

“ Let me go,” she muttered. 

“ Nay — a moment yet. You are not well.” 

“ I am well.” 

“ Indeed ? Then wait a moment.” 

She rested where he motioned ; he looked at her in 
smiling wonder. 

She leaned on one of the cushioned couches, calm, 
motionless, negligent, giving no sign that she saw the 
chamber round her to be any other than the wooden barn 
or thatched cattle-sheds of the old mill-house ; her feet 
were crossed, her limbs were folded in that exquisite 
repose which is inborn in races of the East ; the warmth 
of the room and the long hours of sleep had brought 
the natural bloom to her face, the natural luster to her 
eyes, which earlier fatigue and long illness had banished. 

He surveyed her with that smile which she had re- 
sented on the day when she had besought pity of him 
for Arslan’s sake. 

“ Do you not eat ?” was all he said. 

“ Not here.” 

He laughed, his low humorous laugh that displeased 
her so bitterly, though it was soft of tone. 

“And all those silks, and stuffs, and laces — do they 
please you no better?” 

“ They are not mine.” 

“ Pooh I do you not know yet ? A female thing, as 
beautiful as you are, makes hers everything she looks 
upon ?” 

“ That is a fine phrase.” 

“And an empty one, you think. On my soul ! no. 
Everything you see here is yours, if it please you.” 

She looked at him with dreaming perplexed eyes. 

“ What do you want of me ?” she said, suddenly. 

Nay — why ask ? All men are glad to give to women 
with such a face as yours.” 

She laughed a little ; with the warmth, the rest, the 
wonder, the vague sense of some unknown danger, her 
old skill and courage rose. She knew that she had 
promised to be grateful always to this man : otherwise, 
— oh, God I — how she could have hated him, she thought I 


456 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


“ Why she answered, “ why ? Oh, only this : when 
I bought a measure of pears for Flamma in the market- 
place, the seller of them would sometimes pick me out a 
big yellow bon-chretien, soft as butter, sweet as sugar, 
and offer it to me for myself. Well, when he did that, 
I always knew that the weight was short, or the fruit 
rotten. This is a wonderful pear you would give me; 
but is your measure false?’’ 

He looked at her with a curious wonder and admira- 
tion ; he was angered, humbled, incensed, and allured, 
and yet he was glad ; she looked so handsome thus with 
the curl on her quiet lips, and her spirited head fit for a 
bronze cast of Atalanta. 

He was an old man ; he could bear to pause and rightly 
appreciate the charm of scorn, the spur of irony, the good 
of hatred. He knew the full value of its sharp spears 
to the wonder-blooming aloe. 

He left the subject for a happier moment, and, seating 
himself, opened his hands to warm them by the wood fire, 
still watching her with that smile, which for its very in- 
dulgence, its merry banter, she abhorred. 

“ You lost your Norse god as I prophesied ?” he asked, 
carelessly. 

He saw her whole face change as with a blow, and 
her body bend within itself as a young tree bends under 
a storm. 

“ He went when you gave him the gold,” she said be- 
low her breath. 

“ Of course he went. You would have him set free,” 
he said, with the little low laugh still in his throat. 
“ Did I not say you must dream of nothing else if once 
you had him freed? You would be full of faith; and 
unbar your eagle’s prison-house, and then, because he 
took wing through the open door, you wonder still. That 
is not very wise, Folle-Farine.” 

“ I do not wonder,” she said, with fierce effort, stifling 
her misery. “ He had a right to do as he would : have 
I said any otherwise ?” 

“No. You are very faithful still, I see. Yet, I can- 
not think that you believed my prophecy, or you — a 
woman — bad never been so strong. You think I can 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


457 


tell you of his fate ? Nay, on my soul I know nothing. 
Men do not speak his name. He may be dead ; — you 
shrink ? So I can it matter so much ? He is dead to 
you. He is a great man, but he is a fool. Half his 
genius would give him the fame he wants with much 
greater swiftness than the whole ever will. The world 
likes talent, which serves it. It hates genius, which 
rules it. Men would adore his technical treatment, his 
pictorial magnificence, his anatomical accuracy ; but they 
will always be in awe of his intensity of meaning, of his 
marvelous fertility, of his extraordinary mingling of the 
chillest of idealisms and the most unsparing of sensuali- 
ties, — but I talk idly. Let us talk of you ; see, I chose 
your likeness, and he let me have it — did you dream that 
he would part with it so lightly V'' 

“ Why not ? He had a million things more beautiful.” 

He looked at her keenly. He could measure the superb 
force of this unblenching and mute courage. 

“ In any other creature such a humility would be 
hypocrisy. But it is not so in you. Why will you carry 
yourself as in an enemy’s house? Will you not even 
break your fast with me ? Nay, that is sullen, that is 
barbaric. Is there nothing that can please you ? See 
here, — all women love these ; the gypsy as well as the 
empress. Hold them a moment.” 

She took them ; old oriental jewels lying loose in an 
agate cup on a table near ; there were among them three 
great sapphires, which in their way were priceless, from 
their rare size and their perfect color. 

Her mouth laughed with its old scorn. She, who had 
lost life, soul, earth, heaven, to be consoled with the glass 
beads of a bauble 1 This man seemed to her more foolish 
than any creature that had ever spoken on her ear. 

She looked, then laid them — indifferently — down. 

“ Three sparrow^s eggs are as big, and almost as blue, 
among the moss in any month of May 1” 

He moved them !tway, chagrined. 

“ How do you intend to live ? he asked, dryly. 

“It will come as it comes,” she answered, with the 
fatalism and composure that ran in her Eastern blood. 

39 


458 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


“ What have you done up to this moment since you 
left my house at Rioz 

She told him, briefly; she wanted to hide that she had 
suffered aught, or had been in any measure coldly dealt 
with, and she spoke with the old force of a happier time, 
seeking rather to show how well it was with her that she 
should thus be free, and have no law save her own will, 
and know that none lived who could say to her, “ Come 
hither” or ‘^go there.” 

Almost she duped him, she was so brave, quite. 

His eyes had read the souls and senses of women for 
half a century ; and none had ever deceived him. As he 
listened to her he knew well that under her desolation 
and her solitude her heart was broken — though not her 
courage. 

But he accepted her words as she spoke them. “ Per- 
haps you are wise to take your fate so lightly,” he said 
to her. “But do you know that it is a horrible thing 
to be alone and penniless and adrift, and without a home 
or a friend, when one is a woman and young ?” 

“It is worse when one is a woman and old ; but who 
pities it then ?” she said, with the curt and caustic mean- 
ing that had first allured him in her. 

“And a woman is so soon old I” he added, with as 
subtle a significance. 

She shuddered a little ; no female creature that is 
beautiful and vigorous and young can coldly brook to 
look straight at the doom of age ; death is far less ap- 
palling, because death is uncertain, mystical, and may 
still have beauty. 

“What do you intend to do with yourself?” he pur- 
sued. 

“ Intend ! It is for the rich ‘to intend,’ the poor must 
take what chances.” 

She spoke calmly, leaning down on one of the cush- 
ioned benches by the hearth, resting her chin on her 
hand ; her brown slender feet \ver& crossed one over 
another, her eyelids were heavy from weakness and the 
warmth of the room ; the soft dim light played on her 
tenderly ; he, looked at her with a musing smile. 

“ No beautiful woman need ever be poor,” he said. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


459 


slowly spreading out the delicate palms of his hands to 
the fire ; “ and you are beautiful — exceedingly.’^ 

“ I know !” She gave a quick gesture of her head, tired, 
insolent, indifferent; and a terrible darkness stole over 
her face ; what matter how beautiful she might be, she 
had no beauty in her own sight, for the eyes of Arslan 
had dwelt on her cold, calm, unmoved, whilst he had 
said, “ I would love you — if I could.” 

“You know your value,” Sartorian said, dryly. “ Well, 
then, why talk of poverty and of your future together ? 
they need never be companions in this world.” 

She rose and stood before him in the rosy glow of the 
fire that bathed her limbs until they glowed like jade and 
porphyry. 

“No beautiful woman need be poor — no — no beautiful 
woman need be honest, I dare say.” 

He smiled, holding 'his delicate palms to the warmth 
of his hearth. 

“ Your lover drew a grand vision of Barabbas. Well 
— we choose Barabbas still, just as Jerusalem chose; 
only now, our Barabbas is rnost often a woman. Why 
do you rise ? It is a wet day, out there, and, for the 
spring-time, cold.” 

“ Is it ?” 

“And you have been ill ?” 

“ So they say.” 

“You will die of cold and exposure.” 

“ So best.” ^ 

“ Wait a moment. In such weather I would not let a 
dog stir.” 

“You would if the dog chose to go.” 

“ To a master who forsook it — for a kick and a curse ?” 

Her face burned ; she hung her head instinctively. 
She sank down again on the seat which she had quitted. 
The old horror of shame which she had felt by the water- 
jgide under the orchards bent her strength under this 
man’s unmerciful pressure. She knew that he had her 
secret, and the haughty passion and courage of her nature 
writhed under his taunt of it. 

“ To refuse to stay is uncouth,” he said to her. 

“ I am uncouth, no doubt.” 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


And it is ungrateful.” 

“ I would not be that.” 

“Ungrateful! I did what you asked of me. I un- 
loosed your Othyr of Art to spend his strength as he 
will, in essaying to raise a storm-blast which shall have 
force enough to echo through the endless tunnels of the 
time to come.” 

“ You gave him a handful of gold pieces for that!^^ 

“ Ah 1 if you thought that I should offer him the half 
of my possessions, you wefe disappointed, no doubt. But 
you forgot that ‘ that’ would not sell in the world, as 
yet, for a handful of wheat.” 

She touched the three sapphires. 

“ Are your blue stones of less worth, because I, being 
ignorant, esteem them of no more value than three spar- 
row’s eggs in the hedge ?” 

“ My poor jewels I Well, stay here to-night ; you need 
rest, shelter, and warmth ; and to-morrow you shall go 
as poor as you came, if you wish. But the world is 
very hard. The world is always winter — to the poor,” 
he. added, carelessly, resting his keen far-reaching eyes 
upon her. 

Despite herself she shuddered ; he recalled to her that 
the world was close at hand — the world in which she 
would be houseless, friendless, penniless, alone. 

“A hard world, to those who will not worship its 
gods,” he repeated, musingly. “And you astray in it, 
you poor barbarian, with your noble madness, and your 
blindness of faith and of passion. Do you know what 
it is to be famished, and have none to hear your cries?” 

“ Do I know ?” her voice suddenly gathered strength 
and scorn, and rang loud on the stillness. “ Do ?/ou? 
The empty dish, the chill stove, the frozen feet, the long 
nights, with the roof dripping rain, the sour berries and 
hard roots that mock hunger, the mud floors, with the 
rats fighting to get first at your bed, the bitter black 
months, whose saints’ days are kept by new pains, and 
whose holy days are feasted by fresh diseases. Do I 
know? Do 2/ou?” 

He did not answer her ; he was absorbed in his study 
of her face ; he was thinking how she would look in 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


461 


Paris in some theatre’s spectacle of Egypt, with anklets 
of dull gold and a cymar of dead white, and behind her 
a sea of palms and a red and sullen sky. 

“ What a fool he must have been !” he thought, as his 
eyes went from her to the study of her sleeping in the 
poppies. “ What a fool I he left his lantern of Aladdin 
behind him.” 

“ You remember unlovely things,” he said, aloud. 
“ No, I do not know them ; and I should not have sup- 
posed that you, who did, coflld so much have cared to 
know them more, or could have clung to them as the 
only good, as you now seem to do. You cannot love 
such hardships ?” 

“ I have never known luxuries ; and I do not wish to 
know them.” 

“ Then you are no woman. What is your idea of the 
most perfect life ?” 

“I do not know — to be always in the open air, and to 
be quite free, and forever to see the sun.” 

“Not a low ideal. You "must await the Peruvian 
Paradise. Meanwhile there is a dayspring that repre- 
sents the sun not ill ; we call it Wealth.” 

“ Ah I” she could not deride this god, for she knew it 
was the greatest of them all ; when the rod of riches 
had been lost, had not the Far-Striking King himself 
been brought low and bound down to a slave’s 
drudgery ? 

The small, keen, elfin, satiric face bent on her did not 
change from its musing study, its slow, vigilant smile ; 
holding her under the subtle influence of his gaze, Sar- 
torian began to speak, — speak as he could at choice, with 
accents sweet as silver, slow words persuasive as sorcery. 
With the terse, dainty, facile touches of a master, he 
placed before her that world of which she knew no more 
than any one of the reeds that blew by the sands of the 
river. 

lie painted to her that life of all others which was in 
most vital contrast and unlikeness to her own ; the life 
of luxury, of indolence, of carelessness, of sovereignty, 
of endless pleasure, and supreme delight ; he painted to 
her the years of a woman rich, caressed, omnipotent, 
39 * 


462 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


beautiful, supreme, with all the world before her from 
which to choose her lovers, her playthings, her triumphs, 
her victories, her cruelties, and her seductions. He painted 
the long cloudless invigorating day of such a favorite of 
fortune, with its hours winged by love, and its laughter 
rhymed to music, and its wishes set to gold ; the same 
day for the same woman, whether it were called of Rome 
or of Corinth, of Byzantium or of Athens, of Babylon or 
of Paris, and whether she herself were hailed hetaira or 
imperatrix. He drew sucS things as the skill of his 
words and the deep knowledge of his many years enabled 
him, in language which aroused her even from the ab- 
sorption of her wretchedness, and stirred her dull dis- 
ordered thoughts to a movement of restless discontent, 
and of strange wonder — Arslan had never spoken to her 
thus. 

He let his words dwell silently on her mind, awhile: 
then suddenly he asked her, — 

“ Such lives are ; do you not envy them 

She thought, — “Envy them? she? what could she 
envy save the eyes that looked on Arslan’s face?” 
“What were the use?” she said aloud; “all my life I 
have seen all things are for others ; nothing is for me.” 

“ Your life is but just opening. Henceforth you shall 
see all things for you, instead.” 

She flashed her eyes upon him. 

“ How can that be ?” 

“Listen to me; you are alone in the world, Folle- 
Farine ?” 

“Alone; yes.” 

“ You have not a coin to stand a day between you and 
hunger ?” 

“ Not one.” 

“ You know of no roof that will shelter you for so much 
as a night ?” 

“Not one.” 

“ You have just left a public place of pestilence ?” 

“Yes.” 

“And you know that every one’s hand is against you 
because you are nameless and bastard, and come of a pro- 
scribed people, who are aliens alike in every land ?” 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


463 


“I am Folle-Farine ; yes.” 

For a moment he was silent. The simple, pathetic 
acceptance of the fate that made her name — merely be- 
cause hers — a symbol of all things despised, and desolate, 
and forsaken, touched his heart and moved him to a sor- 
rowful pity. But the pity died, and the cruelty remained 
alive behind it. 

He bent on her the magnetic power of his bright, sar- 
donic, meaning eyes. 

“Well — be Folle-Farine still. Why not? But let 
Folle-Farine mean no longer a beggar, an outcast, a leper, 
a thing attainted, proscribed, and forever suspected ; but 
let it mean on the ear of every man that hears it the name 
of the most famous, the most imperious, the most tri- 
umphant, the most beautiful woman of her time ; a woman 
of whom the world says, ‘look on her face and die — you 
have lived enough.’” 

Her breath came and went as she listened ; the blood 
in her face flushed and paled ; she trembled violently, 
and her whole frame seemed to dilate and strengthen 
and vibrate with the electric force of that subtlest tempta- 
tion. 

“II” she murmured brokenly. 

“ Yes, you. All that I say you shall be : homeless, 
tribeless, nameless, nationless, though you stand there 
now, Folle-Farine.” 

The wondrous promise swept her fancy for the moment 
on the strong current of its imagery, as a river sweeps a 
leaf. This empire hers ? — hers ? — when all mankind had 
driven and derided her, and shunned her sight and touch, 
and cursed and flouted her, and barely thought her worthy 
to be called “ thou dog!” 

He looked at her and smiled, and bent towards the 
warmth of the fire. 

“All that I say you shall bo ; and — the year is all win- 
ter for the poor, Folle-Farine.” 

The light on her face faded ; a sudden apprehension 
tightened at her heart ; on her face gathered the old flerce 
deadly antagonism which constant insult and attack had 
taught her to assume on the first instant of menace as 
her only buckler. 


464 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


She knew not what evil threatened ; but vaguely she 
felt that treason was close about her. 

“ If you do not mock me,” she said slowly, “if you do 
Qot — how will you make me what you promise ?” 

“ I will show the world to you, you to the world ; your 
beauty will do the rest.” 

The darkness and the perplexed trouble deepened on 
her face ; she rose and stood and looked at him, her teeth 
shut together with a quick sharp ring, her straight proud 
brows drew together in stormy silence ; all the tigress in 
her was awoke and rising ready to spring ; yet amid that 
dusky passion, that withering scorn of doubt, there was an 
innocent pathetic wonder, a vague desolation and disap- 
pointment, that were childlike and infinitely sad. 

“This is a wondrous pear you offer mel” she said, 
bitterly. “ And so cheap ? — it must be rotten some- 
where.” 

“ It is golden. Who need ask more ?” 

And he laughed his little low laugh in his throat. 

Then, and then only, she understood him. 

With a sudden unconscious instinctive action her hand 
sought her knife, but the girdle was empty ; she sprang 
erect, her face on fire with a superb fury, her eyes blazing 
like the eyes of a wild beast’s by night, a magnificence 
of scorn and rage upon her quivering features 

Her voice rang clear and hard and cold as ring the 
blows of steel. 

“ I ask more, — that I should pluck it with clean hands, 
and eat of it with pure lips. Strange quibble for a beg- 
gar, — homeless, penniless, tribeless, nationless 1 So you 
think, no doubt. But we who are born outlawed are 
born free, — and do not sell our freedom. Let me go.” 

Ho watched her with a musing smile, a dreamy calm 
content ; all this tempest of her scorn, all this bitterness 
of her disdain, all this whirlwind of her passion and her 
suffering, seemed but to beguile him more and make him 
surer of her beauty, of her splendor, of her strength. 

“ She would be a great creature to show to the world, 
he thought, as he drooped his head and watched her 
through his half-closed eyelids, as the Red Mouse watched 
the sleeper in the poppies. “ Let you go ?” he said, with 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


465 


that slow, ironic smile, — “ let you go ? Why should I let 
you go, Folle-Farine 

She stooped as a tigress stoops to rise the stronger for 
her death spring, and her voice was low, on a level with 
his ear. 

“ Why? Why ? To save your own life — if you are 
wise.” 

He laiighed in his throat again. 

“Ah, ah! It is never wise to threaten, Folle-Farine. 
I do not threaten. You are foolish ; 3mu are unreason- 
able : and that is the privilege of a woman. I am not 
angered at it. On the contrary, it adds to your charm. You 
are a beautiful, reckless, stubborn, half-mad, half-savage 
creature. Passion and liberty become you, — become you 
like your ignorance and your ferocity. I would not for 
worlds that you should change them.” 

“ Let me go !” she cried, across his words. 

“ Oh, fool ! the winter will be hard, — and you are bare 
of foot, — and you have not a crust!” 

“ Let me go.” 

“ Ah ! Go ? — to beg your way to Paris, and to creep 
through the cellars and the hospitals till can see your 
lover’s face, and to crouch a moment at his feet to hear 
him mutter a curse ou you in payment for your pilgrim- 
age; and then to slit your throat or his — in your despair, 
and lie dead in all your loveliness in the common ditch.” 

“ Let me go, I say !” 

“ Or else, more like, come back to me in a week’s time 
and say, ‘ I was mad but now I am wise. Give me the 
golden pear. What matter a little speck ? What is 
golden may be rotten ; but to all lips it is sweet.’ ” 

“ Let me go !” 

She stood at bay before him, pale in her scorn of rags, 
her right hand clinched against her breast, her eyes breath- 
ing fire, her whole attitude instinct with the tempest of 
contempt and loathing, which she held down thus, passive 
and almost wordless, because she once had promised 
never to be thankless to this man. 

He gazed at her and smiled, and thought how beautiful 
that chained whirlwind of her passions looked ; but he 
did not touch her nor even go nearer to her. There was 


4G6 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


a dangerous gleam in her eyes that daunted him.^ More- 
over, he was patient, humorous, gentle, cruel, wise, — all 
in one; and he. desired to tame and to beguile her, and to 
see her slowly drawn into the subtle sweetness of the 
powers of gold ; and to enjoy the yielding of each moral 
weakness one by one, as the southern boy slowly pulls 
limb from limb, wing from wing, of the cicala. 

“ I will let you go, surely,” he said, with his low, 
grim laugh. “ I keep no woman prisoner against her 
will. But think one moment longer, Folle-Farine. You 
will take no gift at my hands 

“ None.” 

“ You want to go, — penniless as you are ?” 

“I will go so, — no other way.” 

“You will fall ill on the road afresh.” 

“ That does not concern you.” 

“ You will starve.” 

“ That is my question.” 

“ You will have to herd with the street dogs.” 

“ Their bite is better than your welcome.” 

“You will be suspected, — most likely imprisoned. You 
are an outcast.” 

“ That may be.” 

“You will be driven to public charity.” 

“Not till I need a public grave.” 

“You will have never a glance of pity, never a look 
of softness, from your northern god ; he has no love for 
you, and he is in his grave most likely. Icarus falls — 
always.” 

For the first time she quailed as though struck by a 
sharp blow ; but her voice remained inflexible and 
serene. 

“ I can live without love or pity, as I can without 
home or gold. Once for all, — let me go.” 

“ I will let you go,” he said, slowly, as he moved a 
little away. “ I will let you go in seven days’ time. For 
seven days you shall do as you please ; eat, drink, be 
clothed, be housed, be feasted, be served, be beguiled, — 
as the rich are. You shall taste all these things that 
gold gives, and which you, being ignorant, dare rashly 
deride and refuse. If, when seven days end, you still 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


467 


choose, you shall go, and as poor as you came. But you 
will not choose, for you are a woman, Folle-Farine !” 

Ere she knew his intent he had moved the panel and 
drawn it behind him, and left her alone, — shut in a trap 
like the birds that Claudis Flamma had netted in his 
orchards. 

That night, when the night without was quite dark, 
she knelt down before the study of the poppies, and kissed 
it softly, and prayed to the unknown God, of whom none 
had taught her in anywise, yet whose light she still had 
found, and followed in a dim, wondering, imperfect fash- 
ion, as a little child lost in the twilight of some pathless 
wood, pursues in trembling the gleam of some great, still 
planet looming far above her through the leaves. 

When she arose from her supplication, her choice was 
already made. 

And the Red Mouse had no power on her, because of 
her great love. 


CHAPTER X. 

At sunrise a great peacock trailing his imperial purple 
on the edge of a smooth lawn, pecked angrily at a torn 
fragment of a scarlet scarf; a scarf that had been woven 
in his own Eastern lands, but which incensed his sight, 
fluttering there so idly, as it seemed, on the feathery sprays 
of a little low almond-tree that grew by the water’s edge. 

The water was broad, and full of lily-leaves and of rare 
reeds and rushes; it had been so stemmed and turned by 
art that it washed the basement walls and mirrored the 
graceful galleries and arches of the garden palace, where 
the bird of Here dwelt. 

Twenty feet above the level of the gardens, where the 
peacock swept in the light, there was an open casement, 
a narrow balcony of stone ; a group of pale human faces 
looking out awe-stricken. A leap in the night — the night 
wet and moonless, — waters a fathom deep,--a bed of sand 
treacherous and shifting as the ways of love. What could 


468 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


all these be save certain death ? Of death they were afraid ; 
but they were more afraid yet of the vengeance of their 
flute-voiced lord. 

On the wall the Red Mouse sat among the flowers of 
sleep ; he could have told ; he who for once had heard 
another prayer than the blasphemies of the Brocken. 

But the Red Mouse never tells any secret to men ; he 
has lived too long in the breast of the women whom men 
love. 

The Sun came from the east, and passed through the 
pale stricken faces that watched from the casement, and 
came straight to where the Red Mouse sat amidst the 
poppies. 

“ Have you let a female soul escape you V'* said the 
Sun. 

The Red Mouse answered: 

“ Love is stronger than I. When he keeps his hands 
pure, where he guards the door of the soul, I enter not. 
I sit outside and watch, and watch, and watch. But it 
is time lost. Love is strong ; the door is barred to me.’^ 

Said the Sun : 

“ That is strange to hear. My sister, the Moon, has 
told me oftentimes that Eros is your pander — always.” 

“Anteros only,” said the Red Mouse. 

The Sun, wondering, said again: 

“And yet I have heard that it is your boast that into 
every female soul you enter at birth, and dwell there unto 
death. Is it, then, not so ?” 

The Red Mouse answered: 

“ The boast is not mine ; it is man’s.” 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


469 


CHAPTER XL 

In the dark of the night she had leapt to what, as she 
thought, would prove her grave ; but the waters, with 
human-like caprice, had cast her back upon the land with 
scarce an effort of her own. Given Wk thus to life, 
whether she would or no, she by sheer instinct stumbled 
to her feet and fled as fast as she could in the wet, gloomy 
night through the grassy stretches of the unknown gar- 
dens and lands in which she found herself. 

She was weighted with her soaked clothes as with 
lead, but she was made swift by terror and hatred, as 
though Hermes for once had had pity for anything human, 
and had fastened to her feet his own winged sandals. 

She ran on and on, not knowing whither ; only know- 
ing that she ran from the man who had tempted her by 
the strength of the rod of wealth. 

The rains were ceaseless, the skies had no stars, in the 
dense mist no lights far or near, of the city or planets, 
of palace or house were seen. She did not know where 
she went ; she only ran on away and away, anywhere, 
from the Red Mouse and its master. 

When the daybreak grew gray in the heavens, she 
paused, and trembling crept into a cattle-shed to rest and 
take breath a little. She shrank from every habitation, 
she quivered at every human voice ; she was afraid — 
horribly afraid — in those clinging vapors, those damp 
deathly smells, those ghostly shadows of the dawn, those 
indistinct and unfamiliar creatures of a country strange 
to her. 

That old man with the elffs eyes, who had tempted 
her, was he a god too, she wondered, since he had the 
rod that metes power and wealth ? He might stretch 
his hand anywhere, she supposed, and take her. 

The gentle cattle in their wooden home made way for 
40 


4t0 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


her, and humbly welcomed her. She hid herself among 
their beds of hay, and in the warmth of their breath and 
their bodies. She was wet and wretched, like any half- 
drowned dog ; but the habits of her hardy life made cold, 
and hunger, and exposure almost powerless to harm her. 
She slept from sheer exhaustion of mind and body. The 
cattle could have trodden her to death, or tossed her 
through the open spaces of their byres, but they seemed 
to know, they seemed to pity ; and they stirred so that 
they did not brush a limb of her, nor shorten a moment 
of her slumbers. 

When she awoke the sun was high. 

A herdswoman, entering with the loud, harsh clash of 
, brazen pails, kicked her in the loins, and rated her furi- 
ously for daring to rest there. She arose at the kick, 
and went out from the place passively, not well knowing 
what she did. 

The morning was warm and radiant; the earth and 
the trees were dripping with the rains of the night ; the 
air was full of sweet odors, and of a delicious coldness. 
As far as she saw there was no token far or near of the 
gleaming cloud of the city of her dreams. She ventured 
to ask at a wayside cabin if she were near to or far 
from Paris. 

The woman of the cottage looked up searchingly from 
the seat before the porch, and for answer cried to her : 
“ Paris ! pouf — f — f I get out, you drowned rat.” 

She had lost for the time the mental force, and even 
the physical force to resent or to persevere ; she was 
weak with hunger and bewildered with her misery. She 
had only sense enough left to remember — and be thank- 
ful — that in the night that was past she had been strong. 

The sun beat on her head, the road was hard, and 
sharp-set with flint; she was, full of pain, her brain 
throbbed with fever and reeled with weakness ; a sudden 
horror seized her lest she might die before she had looked 
again on the face of Arslan. 

She saw the dusky shade of a green wood ; by sheer 
instinct she crept into it as a stricken deer into its sanct- 
uary. 

She sat in the darkness of the trees in the coolness of 


FOLLE-FARINE, 


m 


the wood, and rested her head on her hands, and let the 
big salt tears drop one by one, as the death tears of the 
llama fall. 

This was the young year round her ; that she knew. 

The winter had gone by ; its many months had passed 
over her head whilst she was senseless to any flight of 
night or day ; death might have taken the prey which it 
had once been robbed of by her ; in all this weary season, 
which to her was as a blank, his old foes of failure and 
famine might have struggled for and vanquished him, 
she not being by ; his body might lie in any plague-ditch 
of the nameless poor, his hand might rot fleshless and 
nerveless in any pit where the world cast its useless and 
dishonored dead ; the mould of his brain might make a 
feast for eyeless worms, not more stone blind than was 
the human race he had essayed to serve ; the beauty of 
his face might be a thing of loathsomeness from which a 
toad would turn. Oh, God I would death never take her 
likewise ? Was she an outcast even from that one tribe- 
less and uncounted nation of the dead ? 

That god whom she had loved, whom she had chosen, 
whose eyes had been so full of pity, whose voice had 
murmured: “Nay, the wise know me as man’s only 
friend” : — even he, Thanatos, had turned against her and 
abandoned her. 

Vague memories of things which she had heard in 
fable and tradition, of bodies accursed and condemned to 
wander forever unresting and wailing ; of spirits, which 
for their curse were imprisoned in a living flesh that 
they could neither lose nor cast away so long as the world 
itself endured; creatures that the very elements had 
denied, and that were too vile for fire to burn, or water 
to drown, or steel to slay, or old age to whither, or 
death to touch and take in any wise. All these memo- 
ries returned to her, and in her loneliness she wondered 
if she were such a one as these. 

She did not know, indeed, that she had done any great 
sin ; she had done none willingly, and yet all people 
called her vile, and they must know. 

Even the old man, mocking her, had said : 

“Never wrestle with Fate. He throws the strongest, 


) 


472 FOLLE-FARINE, 

soon or late. And your fate is shame ; it was your birth- 
gift, it will be your burial-cloth. Can you cast it off? 
No. But you can make it potent as gold, and sweet as 
honey if you choose, Folle-Farine.” 

And she had not chosen ; yet of any nobility in the re- 
sistance she did not dream. She had shut her heart to 
it by the unconscious instinct of strength, as she had shut 
her lips under torture, and shut her hands against life. 

She sat there in the wood, roofless, penniless, friend- 
less, and every human creature was against her. Her 
tempter had spoken only the bare and bleak truth. A 
dog stoned and chased and mad could be the only living 
thing on the face of the earth more wretched and more 
desolate than herself. 

The sun of noon was bright above-head in a cloudless 
sky, but in the little wood it was cool and shady, and 
had the moisture of a heavy morning dew. Millions of 
young leaves had uncurled themselves in the warmth. 
Little butterflies, some azure, some yellow, some white, 
danced in the light. Brown rills of water murmured 
under the grasses, the thrushes sang to one another 
through the boughs, and the lizard darted hither and 
thither, green as the arrowy leaves that made its shelter. 

A little distance from her there was a group of joyous 
singers who looked at her from time to time, their 
laughter hushing a little, and their simple carousal under 
the green boughs broken by a nameless chillness and in- 
voluntary speculation. She did not note them, her face 
being bowed down upon her hands, and no sound of the 
thrushes’ song or of the human singers’ voices rousing 
her from the stupefaction of despair which drugged her 
senses. 

They watched her long ; her attitude did not change. 

One of them at length rose up and went, hesitating, a 
step or two forwards ; a girl with winking feet, clad 
gayly in bright colors, though the texture of her clothes 
was poor. 

She went and touched the crouched, sad figure softly. 

“ Are you in trouble ?” 

The figure lifted its bowed head, its dark, hopeless eyes. 

Folle-Farine looked up with a stare and a shiver. 


FOLLE-FARINE, 


m 


It is no matter, I am only — tired.’’ 

“ Are you all alone ?” 

“ Yes.” 

“ Come and sit with us a moment. You are in the 
damp and the gloom ; we are so pleasant and sunny 
there. Come.” 

“ You are good, but let me be.” 

The blue-eyed girl called to the others. They lazily 
rose and came. 

“ Heaven 1 she is handsome I” the men muttered to 
one another. 

She looked straight at them all, and let them be. 

“ You are all alone ?” they asked her again. 

“ Always,” she answered them. 

“You are going — where ?” 

“ To Paris 

“ What to d'b there ?” 

“ I do not know.” 

“You look wet — suffering — what is the matter?” 

“ I was nearly drowned last night — an accident — it is 
nothing.” 

“ Where have you slept ?” 

“ In a shed : with some cattle.” 

“ Could you get no shelter in a house ?” 

“ I did not seek any.” 

“ What do you do ? What is your work ?” 

“ Anything — nothing.” 

“ What is your name ?” 

“ Folle-Farine.” 

“ That means the chaff j — less than the chaff, — the 
dust.” 

“ It means me.” 

They were silent, only bending on her their bright 
curious eyes. 

They saw that she was unspeakably wretched ; that 
some great woe or shock had recently fallen on her, and 
given her glance that startled horror and blanched her 
rich skin to an ashen pallor, and frozen, as it were, the 
very current of the young blood in her veins. 

They were silent a little space. Then whispered 
togetlier. 

40 * 


474 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


‘‘ Come with us,’’ they urged. We, too, go to Paris. 
We are poor. We follow art. We will befriend you.” 

She was deaf to them long, being timid and wild of 
every human thing. But they were urgent; they were 
eloquent; these young girls with their bright eyes; 
these men who spoke of art ; these wanderers who went 
to the great city. 

In the end they pressed on her their companionship. 
They, too, were going to Paris ; they spoke of perils she 
would run, of vouchers she would need : she wondered 
at their charity, but in the end walked on with them — 
fearing the Red Mouse. 

They were mirthful, gentle people, so she thought: 
they said they followed art; they told her she could 
never enter Paris nameless and alone : so she went. The 
chief of the little troop watched wonderingly her step, 
her posture, her barbaric and lustrous beauty, brilliant 
still even through the pallor of grief and the weariness 
of fatigue; of these he had never seen the like before, 
and he knew their almost priceless value in the world, 
and of the working classes and street mobs of Paris. 

“ Listen,” he said suddenly to her. We shall play 
to-night at the next town. Will you take a part?” 

Walking along through the glades of the wood, lost 
in thought, she started at his voice. 

“ I do not know what you mean ?” 

“I mean — will you show yourself with us? We will 
give you no words. It will be quite easy. What money 
we make we divide among us. All you shall do shall 
be to stand and be looked at — you are beautiful, and you 
know it, no doubt?” 

She made a weary sign of assent. Beautiful ? What 
could it matter if she were so, or if she were not, what 
the mere thought of it ? The beauty that she owned, 
though so late a precious possession, a crown of glory 
to her, had lost all its fairness and all its wonder since it 
had been strengthless to bind to hers the only heart in 
which she cared to rouse a throb of passion, since it had 
been unworthy to draw upon it with any lingering gaze 
of love the eyes of Arslan. 

He looked at her more closely ; this was a strange 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


475 


creature, he thought, who, being a woman and in her 
first youth, could thus acknowledge her own loveliness 
with so much candor, yet so much indifference. 

That afternoon they halted at a little town that stood 
in a dell across the fields, a small place lying close about 
a great church tower. 

It was almost dusk when they entered it ; but it was 
all alive with lights and shows, and trumpets and ban- 
ners ; it was the day of a great fair, and the merry-go- 
rounds were whirling, and the trades in gilded cakes and 
puppets of sugar were thriving fast, and the narrow 
streets were full of a happy and noisy peasant crowd. 

As soon as the little troop entered the first street a glad 
cry rose. 

They were well known and well liked there ; the people 
clustered by dozens round them, the women greeting them 
with kisses, the children hugging the dogs, the men 
clamoring with invitations to eat and to drink and be 
merry. 

They bade her watch them at their art in a rough 
wooden house outside the wine tavern. 

She stood in the shadow and looked as they bade her, 
while the mimic life of their little stage began and lived 
its hour. 

To the mind which had received its first instincts of 
art from the cold, lofty, passionless creations of Arslkn, 
from the classic purity and from the divine conception of 
the old Hellenic ideal, the art of the stage could seem but 
poor and idle mimicry ; gaudy and fragrantless as any 
painted rose of paper blooming on a tinseled stem. 

The crystal truthfulness, the barbaric liberty, the pure 
idealism of her mind and temper revolted in contempt 
from the visible presentment and the vari-colored harle- 
quinade of the actor’s art. To her, a note of song, a 
gleam of light, a shadowy shape, a veiled word, were 
enough to unfold to her passionate fancy a world of dreams, 
a paradise of faith and of desire ; and for this very cause 
she shrank away, in amazement and disgust, from this 
realistic mockery of mere humanity, which left nothing 
for the imagination to create, which spoke no other tongue 
than the common language of human hopes and fears. It 


4T6 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


could not touch her, it could not move her ; it filled her — 
so far as she could bring herself to think of it at all — 
with a cold and wondering contempt. 

For to the reed which has once trembled under the 
melody born of the breath divine, the voices of mortal 
mouths, as they scream in rage, or exult in clamor, or 
contend in battle, must ever seem the idlest and the 
emptiest of all the sounds under heaven. 

“ That is your art she said wearily to the actors when 
they came to her. 

“ Well, is it not art ; and a noble one 

A scornful shadow swept across her face. 

“It is no art. It is human always. It is never divine. 
There is neither heaven nor hell in it. It is all earth.” 

They were sharply stung. 

“What has given you such thoughts as that?” they 
said, in their impatience and mortification. 

“ I have seen great things,” she said simply, and turned 
away and went out into the darkness, and wept, — alone. 

She who had knelt at the feet of Thanatos, and who 
had heard the songs of Pan amidst the rushes by the 
river, and had listened to the charmed steps of Persephone 
amidst the flowers of the summer; — could she honor 
lesser gods than these ? 

“ They may forget — they may forsake, and he likewise, 
but I never,” she thought. 

If only she might live a little longer space to serve and 
suffer for them and for him still ; of fate she asked nothing 
higher. 

That night there was much money in the bag. The 
players pressed a share upon her ; but she refused. 

“ Have I begged from you ?” she said. “ I have earned 
nothing.” 

It was with exceeding difficulty that they ended in per- 
suading her even to share their simple supper. 

She took only bread and water, and sat and watched 
them curiously. 

The players were in high spirits ; their chief ordered a 
stoup of bright wine, and made merry over it with gayer 
songs and louder laughter, and more frequent jests than 
even were his wont. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


4n 

The men and women of the town came in and out with 
merry interchange of words. The youths of the little 
bourg chattered light amorous nonsense ; the young girls 
smiled and chattered in answer ; whilst the actors ban- 
tered them and made them a hundred love prophecies. 

Now and then a dog trotted in to salute the players’ 
poodles ; now and then the quaint face of a pig looked 
between the legs of its master. 

The door stood open ; the balmy air blew in ; beyond, 
the stars shone in a cloudless sky. 

She sat without in the darkness, where no light fell 
among the thick shroud of one of the blossoming boughs 
of pear-trees, and now and then she looked and watched 
their laughter and companionship, and their gay and 
airy buffoonery, together there within the winehouse 
doors. 

“All fools enjoy !” she thought; with that bitter won- 
der, that aching disdain, that involuntary injustice, with 
which the strong sad patience of a great nature surveys 
the mindless merriment of lighter hearts and brains more 
easily lulled into forgetfulness and content. 

They came to her and pressed on her a draught of the 
wine, a share of the food, a handful of the honeyed cates 
of their simple banquet; even a portion of their silver 
and copper pieces with which the little leathern sack of 
their receipts was full, — for once, — to the mouth. 

She refused all: the money she threw passionately 
away. 

“Am I a beggar she said, in her wrath. 

She remained without in the gloom among the cool 
blossoming branches that swayed above-head in the still 
night, while the carousal broke up and the peasants went 
on their way to their homes, singing along the dark 
streets, and the lights were put out in the winehouse, 
and the trill of the grasshopper chirped in the fields 
around. 

“You will die of damp, roofless in the open air this 
moonless night,” men, as they passed away, said to her 
in wonder. 

“ The leaves are roof enough for me,” she answered 
them ; and stayed there with her head resting on the roll 


478 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


of her sheepskin ; wide awake through the calm dark hours ; 
for a bed within she knew that she could not pay, and 
she would not let any charity purchase one for her. 

At daybreak when the others rose she would only take 
from them the crust that was absolutely needful to keep 
life in her. Food seemed to choke her as it passed her 
lips, — since how could she tell but what his lips were 
parched dry with hunger or were blue and cold in death ? 

That morning, as they started, one of the two youths 
who bore their traveling gear and the rude appliances of 
their little stage upon his shoulders from village to village 
when they journeyed thus — being oftentimes too poor to 
permit themselves any other mode of transit and of por- 
terage — fell lame and grew faint and was forced to lay 
down his burden by the roadside. 

She raised the weight upon her back and head as she 
had been wont to do the weights of timber and of corn 
for the mill-house, and bore it onward. 

In vain they remonstrated with her; she would not 
yield, but carried the wooden framework and the folded 
canvases all through the heat and weariness of the noon- 
day. 

“ You would have me eat of your supper last night. 
I will have you accept of my payment to-day,’’ she said, 
stubbornly. 

For this seemed to her a labor innocent and just, and 
even full of honor, whatever men might say : had not 
Helios himself been bound as a slave in Thessaly ? 

They journeyed far that day, along straight sunlit 
highways, and under the shadows of green trees. The 
fields were green with the young corn and the young 
vines ; the delicate plumes of the first blossoming lilacs 
nodded in their footsteps ; the skies were blue ; the earth 
was fragrant. 

At noonday the players halted and threw themselves 
down beneath a poplar-tree, in a wild rose thicket, to eat 
their noonday meal of bread and a green cress salad. 

The shelter they had chosen was full of fragrance from 
rain-drops still wet upon the grasses, and the budding 
rose vines. The hedge was full of honeysuckle and 
tufts of cowslips; the sun was warmer; the mild-eyed 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


479 


cattle came and looked at them ; little redstarts picked 
up their crumbs; from a white vine- hung cottage an old 
woman brought them salt and wished them a fair travel. 

But her heart was sick and her feet weary, and she 
asked always, — “ Where is Paris 

At last they showed it her, that gleaming golden cloud 
upon the purple haze of the horizon. 

She crossed her hands upon her beating breast, and 
thanked the gods that they had thus given her to behold 
the city of his desires. 

The chief of the mimes watched her keenly. 

“ You look at Paris,” he said after a time. “ There 
you may be great if you will.” 

“Great? I?” 

She echoed the word with weary incredulity. She 
knew he could but mock at her. 

“Ay,” he made answer seriously. “ Even you I Why 
not ? There is no dynasty that endures in that golden 
city save only one — the sovereignty of a woman’s 
beauty.” 

She started and shuddered a little ; she thought that 
she saw the Red Mouse stir amidst the grasses. 

“I want no greatness,” she said, slowly. “What 
should I do with it ?” 

For in her heart she thought, — 

“ What would it serve me to be known to all the world 
and remembered by all the ages of men if he forget — 
forget quite ?” 


CHAPTER XIL 

That night they halted in a little bright village of the 
leafy and fruitful zone of the city — one of the fragrant 
and joyous pleasure-places among the woods where the 
students and the young girls came for draughts of milk 
and plunder of primroses, and dances by the light of the 
spring moon, and love-words murmured as they fastened 
violets in each other’s breasts. 


480 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


The next day she entered Paris with them as one of 
their own people. 

“ You may be great here, if you choose,” they said to 
her, and laughed. 

She scarcely heard. She only knew that here it was 
that Arsl^in had declared that fame. — or death — should 
come to him. 

The golden cloud dissolved as she drew near to it. 

A great city might be beautiful to others : to her it was 
only as its gilded^ cage is to a mountain bird. The wil- 
derness of roofs, the labyrinth of streets, the endless 
walls of stone, the ceaseless noises of the living multi- 
tude, these were horrible to the free-born blood of her ; 
she felt blinded, caged, pent, deafened. Its magnificence 
failed to daunt, its color to charm, its pageantry to be- 
guile her. Through the glad and gorgeous ways she 
went, wearily and sick of heart, for the rush of free winds 
and the width of free skies, as a desert-born captive, with 
limbs of bronze and the eyes of the lion, went fettered 
past the palaces of Rome in the triumphal train of Afri- 
canus or Pompeius. 

The little band with which she traveled wondered what 
her eyes so incessantly looked for, in that perpetual intent- 
ness with which they searched every knot of faces that 
was gathered together as a swarm of bees clusters in the 
sunshine. They could not tell ; they only saw that her 
eyes never lost that look. 

“ Is it the Past or the Future that you search for al- 
ways?” the shrewdest of them asked her. 

She shuddered a little, and made him no answer. 
How could she tell which it was? — whetherdt would be 
a public fame or a nameless grave that she would light 
on at the last ? . 

She was a mystery to them. 

She minded poverty so little. She was as content on 
a draught of water and a bunch of cress as others are on 
rarest meats and wines. She bore bodily fatigue with 
an Arab’s endurance and indifference. She seemed to 
care little whether suns beat on her, or storms drenched 
her to the bone ; whether she slept under a roof or the 
boughs of a tree ; whether the people hissed her for a 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


481 


foreign thing of foul omen, or clamored aloud in the 
streets praise of her perfect face. She cared nothing. 

She was silent always, and she never smiled. 

“ I must keep my liberty I” she had said ; and she 
kept it. 

By night she toiled ceaselessly for her new masters ; 
docile, patient, enduring, laborious, bearing the yoke of 
this labor as she had borne that of her former slavery, 
rather than owe a crust to alms, a coin to the gaze of a 
crowd. But by day she searched the city ceaselessly 
and alone, wandering, wandering, wandering, always on 
a quest that was never ended. For amidst the millions of 
faces that met her gaze, Arslkn’s was not ; and she was 
too solitary, too ignorant, and locked her secret too tena- 
ciously in her heart, to be able to learn tidings of his 
name. 

So the months of the spring and the summer time 
went by ; it was very strange and wondrous to her. 

The human world seemed suddenly all about her ; the 
quiet earth, on which the cattle grazed, and the women 
threshed and plowed, and the sheep browsed the thyme, 
and the mists swept from stream to sea, this was all 
gone ; and in its stead there was a world of tumult, 
color, noise, change, riot, roofs piled on roofs, clouds of 
dust yellow in the sun, walls peopled with countless 
heads of flowers and of women ; throngs, various of hue 
as garden-beds of blown anemones; endless harmonies 
and discords always rung together from silver bells, and 
brazen trumpets, and the clash of arms, and the spray of 
waters, and thq screams of anguish, and the laughs of 
mirth, and-the shrill pijoes of an endless revelry, and the 
hollow sighs of a woe that had no rest. 

For the world of a great city, of “ the world as it is 
man’s,” was all about her; and she loathed it, and sick- 
ened in it, and hid her face from it whenever she could, 
and dreamed, as poets dream in fever of pathless seas and 
tawny fields of weeds, and dim woods filled with the song 
of birds, and cool skies brooding over a purple moor, and 
all the silence and the loveliness and the freedom of “the 
world as it is God’s.” 

“You arc not happy ?” one man said to her. 

41 


482 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


“ Happy I” 

She said no more ; but he thought, just so had he seen 
a rose-crested golden-eyed bird of the great savannas 
look, shut in a cage in a showman’s caravan, and dying 
slowly, with dulled plumage and drooped head, while 
the street mob of a town thrust their lingers through 
the bars and mocked it, and called to it to chatter and be 
gay. 

“ Show your beauty once — just once amidst us on the 
stage, and on the morrow you can choose your riches and 
your jewels from the four winds of heaven as you will,’^ 
the players urged on her a hundred times. 

But she refused always. 

Her beauty — it was given to the gods, to take or leave, 
in life or death, for him. 

The months went on ; she searched for him always. 
A horrible, unending vigil that never seemed nearer its 
end. Yainly, day by day, she searched the crowds and 
the solitudes, the gates of the palaces and the vaults of 
the cellars. She thought she saw him a thousand times ; 
but she could never tell whether it were truth or fancy. 
She never met him face to face : she never heard his 
name. There is no desert wider, no maze more unend- 
ing, than a great city. 

She ran hideous peril with every moment that she 
lived ; but by the strength and the love that dwelt to- 
gether in her she escaped them. Her sad, wide, open, 
pathetic eyes searched only for his face and saw no other ; 
her ear, ever strained to listen for one voice, was dead to 
every accent of persuasion or of passion. , 

When men tried to tell her she was beautiful, she looked 
them full in the eyes and laughed, a terrible dreary laugh 
of scorn that chilled them to the bone. When the gay 
groups on balconies, that glanced golden in the sun, flung 
sweetmeats at her, and dashed wine on the ground, and 
called to her for her beauty’s sake to join them, she 
looked at them with a look that had neither envy nor 
repugnance in it, but only a cold mute weariness of con- 
tempt. 

One day a great sculptor waylaid her, and showed her 
a pouch full of money and precious stones. “All that. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


483 


and more, you shall have, if you will let me make a cast 
of your face and your body once.” In answer, she showed 
him the edge of her hidden knife. 

One day a young man, unlike to all the ragged and 
toil-worn crowds that alone beheld her, came in those 
crowded quarters of the poor, and watched her with eyes 
aglow like those of the youth in the old market-square 
about the cathedral, and waylaid her, later, in solitude, 
and slid in her palm a chain studded with precious stones 
of many colors. 

I am rich,” he murmured to her. “ I am a prince. 
I can make your name a name of power, if only you will 
come.” 

“ Come whither ?” she asked him. 

“ Come with me — only to my supper-table — for one 
hour; my horses wait.” 

She threw the chain of stones at her feet. 

“I have no hunger,” she said, carelessly. Go, ask 
those that have to your feast.” 

And she gave no other phrase in answer to all the 
many honeyed and persuasive words with which in vain 
he urged her, that night and many another night, until he 
wearied. 

One day, in the green outskirts of the city, passing by 
under a gilded gallery, and a wide window, full of flowers, 
and hung with delicate draperies, there looked out the 
fair head of a woman, with diamonds in the ears, and a 
shroud of lace about it, while against the smiling scorn- 
ful mouth a jeweled hand held a rose ; and a woman’s 
voice called to her, mockingly: 

“ Has the devil not heard you yet, that you still walk 
barefoot in the dust on the stones, and let the sun 
beat on your head ? O fool 1 there is gold in the air, 
and gold in the dust, and gold in the very gutter here, for 
a woman !” 

And the face was the face, and the voice the voice, of 
the gardener’s wife of the old town by the sea. 

She raised, to the gilded balcony above, her great sor- 
rowful, musing eyes, full of startled courage : soon she 
comprehended ; and then her ga^ gave back scorn for 
scorn. 


484 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


Does that brazen scroll shade you better than did the 
trellised vine?” she said, with her voice ascending clear 
in Its disdain. “ And are those stones in your breast any 
brighter than the blue was in the eyes of your child ?” 

The woman above cast the rose at her and laughed, 
and withdrew from the casement. 

She set her heel on the rose, and trod its leaves down 
in the dust. It was a yellow rose, scentless and loveless 
— an emblem of pleasure and wealth. She left it where 
it lay, and went onward. 

The sweet sins, and all their rich profits, that she 
might take as easily as she could have taken the rose 
from the dust, had no power to allure her. 

The gilded balcony, the velvet couch, the jewels in the 
ears, the purple draperies, the ease and the affluence and 
the joys of the sights and the senses, these to her were as 
powerless to move her envy, these to her seemed as idle 
as the blow-balls that a child’s breath floated down the 
current of a summer breeze. 

When once a human ear has heard the whispers of the 
gods by night steal through the reeds by the river, never 
again to it can there sound anything but discord and 
empty sound in the tinkling cymbals of brass, and the 
fools’ bells of silver, in which the crowds in their deafness 
imagine the songs of the heroes and the music of the 
spheres. 

“ There are only two trades in a city,” said the actors 
to her, with a smile as bitter as her own, “only two 
trades — to buy souls and to sell them. What business 
have you here, who do neither the one nor the other ?” 

There was music still in this trampled reed of the river, 
into which the gods had once bidden the stray winds and 
the wandering waters breathe their melody ; but there, 
in the press, the buyers and sellers only saw in it a frail 
thing of the sand and the stream, only made to be woven 
for barter, or bind together the sheaves of the roses of 
pleasure. 

By-and-by they grew so impatient of this soul which 
knew its right errand so little that it would neither ac- 
cept temptation itself nor deal it to others, they grew so 
impatient to receive that golden guerdon from passion 


FOLLE-FARINE, 


485 


and evil which they had foreseen as their sure wage for 
her when they had drawn her with them to the meshes 
of the city, that they betrayed her, stung and driven into 
treachery by the intolerable reproach of her continual 
strength, her continual silence. 

They took a heavy price, and betrayed her to the man 
who had set his soul upon her beauty, to make it live 
naked and vile and perfect for all time in marble. She 
saved herself by such madness of rage, such fury of re- 
sistance, as the native tigress knows in the glare of 
the torches or the bonds of the cords. She smote the 
sculptor with her knife ; a tumult rose round ; voices 
shouted that he was stabbed ; the men who had betrayed 
her raised loudest the outcry. In the darkness of a nar- 
row street, and of a night of tempest, she fled from them, 
and buried herself in the dense obscurity which is one of 
the few privileges of the outcasts. 

It was very poor, this quarter where she found refuge ; 
men and women at the lowest ebb of life gathered there 
together. There was not much crime ; it was too poor 
even for that. It was all of that piteous, hopeless class that 
is honest, and suffers and keeps silent — so silent that no 
one notices when death replaces life. 

Here she got leave to dwell a little while in the top- 
most corner of a high tower, which rose so high, so 
high, that the roof of it seemed almost like the very 
country itself. It was so still there, and so fresh, and 
the clouds seemed so near, and the pigeons flew so close 
about it all day long, and at night so trustfully sought 
their roost there. 

In a nook of it she made her home. It was very old, 
very desolate, very barren ; yet she could bear it better 
than she could any lower range of dwelling. She could 
see the sunrise and the sunset ; she could see the rain- 
mists and the planets ; she could look down on all the 
white curl of the smoke ; and she could hear the bells 
ring with a strange, peculiar sweetness, striking straight 
to her ear across the wilderness of roofs. And then she 
had the pigeons. They were not much, but they were 
something of the old, fresh country life j and now and 

41 * 


486 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


then they brought a head of clover, or a spray of grass, 
in their beaks ; and at sight of it the tears would rush 
into her eyes, and though it was pain, it was yet a 
dearer one than any pleasure that she had. 

She maintained herself still without alms, buying her 
right to live there, and the little food that sufficed for 
her, by one of those offices in which the very poor con- 
trive to employ those still poorer than themselves. 

They slept so heavily, those people who had the 
weight of twenty hours’ toil, the pangs of hunger, and 
the chills of cold upon them, whenever they laid them 
down, and who would so willingly have slept forever 
with any night they laid their heads upon their sacks of 
rags. But, so long as they woke at all, they needed to 
wake with the first note of the sparrows in the dark. 

She, so long used to rise ere ever the first streak of 
day were seen, roused scores of them ; and in payment 
they gave her the right to warm herself at their stove, 
a handful of their chestnuts, a fragment of their crust, a 
little copper piece, — anything that they could afford or 
she would consent to take. A woman, who had been 
the reveilleuse of the quarter many years, had died ; and 
they were glad of her : — “ Her eyes have no sleep in 
them,” they said ; and they found that she never failed. 

It was a strange trade — to rise whilst yet for the 
world it was night, and go to and fro the dreary courts, 
up and down the gloom of the staircases, and in and out 
the silent chambers, and call all those sons and daughters 
of wretchedness from the only peace that their lives 
knew. So often she felt so loath to wake them ; so 
often she stood beside the bundle of straw on which 
some dreaming creature, sighing and smiling in her 
sleep, murmured of her home, and had not the heart 
rudely to shatter those mercies of the night. 

It was a strange, sad office, to go alone among all 
those sleepers in the stillness that came before the dawn, 
and move from house to house, from door to door, from 
bed to bed, with the one little star of her lamp alone 
burning. 

They were all so poor, so poor, it seemed more cruel 
than murder only to call them from their rest to work, 


FOLLE-FARINE. 48t 

and keep alive in them that faculty of suffering which 
was all they gained from their humanity. 

Her pity for them grew so great that her heart per- 
force softened to them also. Those strong men gaunt 
with famine, those white women with their starved chil- 
dren on their breasts, those young maidens worn blind 
over the needle or the potter’s clay, those little children 
who staggered up in the dark to go to the furnace, or 
the wheel, or the powder-mill, or the potato-fields outside 
the walls, — she could neither fear them nor hate them, 
nor do aught save sorrow for them with a dumb, passion- 
ate, wondering grief. 

She saw these people despised for no shame, wretched 
for no sin, suffering eternally, though guilty of no other 
fault than that of being in too large numbers on an 
earth too small for the enormous burden of its endless 
woe. She found that she had companions in her misery, 
and that she was not alone under that bitter scorn which 
had been poured on her. In a manner she grew to care 
for these human creatures, all strangers, yet whose soli- 
tude she entered, and whose rest she roused. It was a 
human interest, a human sympathy. It drew her from 
the despair that had closed around her. 

And some of these in turn loved her. 

Neither poverty nor wretchedness could dull the lus- 
trous, deep-hued, flowerlike beauty that was hers by 
nature. As she ascended the dark stone stairs with the 
little candle raised above her head, and, knocking low, 
entered the place where they slept, the men and the chil- 
dren alike dreamed of strange shapes of paradise and 
things of sorcery. 

“ When she wakes us, the children never cry,” said a 
woman whom she always summoned an hour before 
dawn to rise and walk two leagues to a distant factory. 
It was new to her to be welcomed; it was new to see 
the children smile because she touched them. It lifted a 
little the ice that had closed about her heart. 

It had become the height of the summer. The burn- 
ing days and the sultry nights poured down on her bare 
head and blinded her, and filled her throat with the dust 
of the public ways, and parched her mouth with the 
thirst of overdriven cattle. 


488 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


All the while in the hard hot glare she searched for 
one face. All the while in the hard brazen din she lis- 
tened for one voice. 

She wandered all the day, half the night. They won- 
dered that she woke so surely with every dawn ; they 
did not know that seldom did she ever sleep. She sought 
for him always ; — sought the busy crowds of the living ; 
sought the burial-grounds of the dead. 

As she passed through the endless ways in the won- 
drous city ; as she passed by the vast temples of art ; as 
she passed by the open doors of the sacred places which 
the country had raised to the great memories that it 
treasured ; it became clearer to her — this thing of his 
desires, this deathless name amidst a nation, this throne 
on the awed homage of a world for which his life 
had labored, and striven, and sickened, and endlessly 
yearned. 

The great purpose, the great end, to which he had lived 
grew tangible and present to her ; and in her heart, as 
she went, she said ever, “ Let me only die as the reed 
died,-— what matter, — so that only the world speak his 
name 1” 


CHAPTER XIII. 

One night she stood on the height of the leads of the 
tower. The pigeons had gone to roost; the bells had 
swung themselves into stillness ; far below the changing 
crowds were moving ceaselessly, but to that calm altitude 
no sound arose from them. The stars were out, and a 
great silver moon bathed half the skies in its white glory. 
In the stones of the parapet wind-sown blossoms blew to 
and fro heavy with dew. 

The day had been one of oppressive heat. She had 
toiled all through it, seeking, seeking, seeking, what she 
never found. She was covered with dust ; parched with 
thirst ; foot-weary ; sick at heart. She looked down on 


FOLLE-FARTNE. 489 

the mighty maze of the city, and thought, How long, — 
how long 

Suddenly a cool hand touched her, a soft voice mur- 
mured at her ear, — 

“You are not tired, Folle-Farine 

Turning in the gloom she faced Sartorian. A great 
terror held her mute and breathless there ; gazing in the 
paralysis Of horror at this frail life, which was for her 
the incarnation of the world, and by whose lips the world 
said to her, “ Come, eat and drink, and sew your gar- 
ments with gems, and kiss men on the mouth whilst you 
slay them, and plunder and poison, and laugh and be 
wise. For all your gods are dead ; and there is but one 
god now, — that god is gold.” 

“ You must be tired, surely,” the old man said, with 
soft insistance. “You never find what you seek; you are 
always alone, always hungered and poor ; always 
wretched, Folle-Farine. Ah! you would not eat my 
golden pear. It was not wise.” 

He said so little ; and yet, those slow, subtle, brief 
phrases pierced her heart with the full force of their odious 
meaning. She leaned against the wall, breathing hard 
and fast, mute, for the moment paralyzed. 

“ You fled away from me that night. It was heroic, 
foolish, mad. Yet I bear no anger against it. You have 
not loved the old, dead gods for naught. You have the 
temper of their times. You obey them ; though they 
betray you and forget you, Folle-Farine.” 

She gazed at him, fascinated by her very loathing of 
him, as the bird by the snake. 

“ Who told you ?” she muttered. “ Who told you that 
I dwell here ?” 

“The sun has a million rays; so has gold a million 
eyes ; do you not know ? There is nothing you have not 
done that has not been told to me. But I can always 
wait, Folle-Farine. You are very strong ; you are very 
weak, of course ; — you have a faith, and you follow it ; 
and it leads you on and on, on and on, and one day it will 
disappear, — and you will plunge after it, — and it will 
drown you. You seek for this man and you cannot find 
even his grave. You are like a woman who seeks for 


490 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


her lover on a battle-field. But the world is a carnage 
where the vultures soon pick bare the bones of the slain, 
and all skeletons look alike, and are alike, unlovely, Folle- 
Farine.” 

“You came — to say this?” she said, through her 
locked teeth. 

“ Nay — I came to see your beauty : your ice-god tired 

soon ; but I My golden pear would have been 

better vengeance for a slighted passion than his beggar’s 
quarter, and these wretched rags ” 

She held her misery and her shame and her hatred 
alike down under enforced composure. 

“ There is no shame here,” she said, between her teeth. 
“A beggar’s quarter, perhaps ; but these poor copper coins 
and these rags I earn with clean hands.” 

He smiled with that benignant pity, with that malign 
mockery, which stung her so ruthlessly. 

“ No shame ? Oh, Folle-Farine, did I not tell you, 
that, live as you may, shame will be always your gar- 
ment in life and in death ? You — a thing beautiful, 
nameless, homeless, accursed, who dares to dream to be 
innocent likewise ! The world will clothe you with 
shame, whether you choose it or not. But the world, as 
I say, will give you one choice. Take its red robe boldly 
from it, and weight it with gold* and incrust it with 
jewels. Believe me, the women who wear the white 
garments of virtue will envy you the red robe bitterly 
then.” 

Her arms were crossed upon her breast ; her eyef 
gazed at him with the look he had seen in the gloom of 
the evening, under the orchards by the side of the rushing 
mill-water. 

“ You came — to say this ?” 

“ Nay : I came to see your beauty, Folle-Farine. Your 

northern god soon tired, I say ; but I Look yonder 

a moment,” he pursued ; and he motioned downward to 
where the long lines of light gleamed in the wondrous 
city which was stretched at their feet ; and the endless 
murmur of its eternal sea of pleasure floated dimly to 
them on the soft night air. “See here, Folle-Farine: 
you dwell with the lowest ; you are the slave of street 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


491 


mimes; no eyes see you except those of the harlot, the 
beggar, the thief, the outcast; 5 ^our wage is a crust and 
a copper coin ; you have the fate of your namesake, the 
dust, to wander a little while, and then sink on the stones 
of the streets. Yet that you think worthy and faithful, 
because it is pure of alms and of vice. Oh, beautiful 
fool I what would your lost lover say if beholding you 
here amidst the reek of the mob and the homage of 
thieves ? He would say of you the most bitter thing 
that a man can say of a woman : ' She has sunk into 
sin, but she has been powerless to gild her sin, or make 
it of more profit than was her innocence.’ And a man 
has no scorn like the scorn which he feels for a woman 
who sells her soul — at a loss. You see? — ah, surely, 
you see, Folle-Farine ?” 

She shook like a leaf where she stood, with the yellow 
and lustrous moonlight about her. She saw — she saw 
now I 

And she had been mad enough to dream that if she 
lived in honesty, and, by labor that she loathed won. 
back, with hands clean of crime as of alms, the gold 
which ‘he had left in her trust as the wage of her beauty, 
and found him and gave it to him without a word, he 
would at least believe — believe so much as this, that her 
hunger had been famine, and her need misery, and her 
homelessness that of the stray dog which is kicked from 
even a ditch, and hunted from even a graveyard; but 
that through it all she had never touched one coin of 
that cruel and merciless gift. 

“You see ?” pursued the low, flutelike moaning mock- 
ery of her tormentor’s voice. “ You see ? You have all 
the shame ; it is your birthright; and you have nothing 
of the sweetness which may go with shame for a woman 
who has beauty. Now, look yonder. There lies the world, 
which when 1 saw you last was to you only an empty 
name. Now you know it — know it, at least, enough to 
be aware of all you have not, all you might have in it, if 
you took my golden pear. You must be tired, Folle- 
Farine, — to stand homeless under tli.e gilded balconies ; 
to be footsore in the summer dust among the rolling car- 
riages ; to stand outcast and famished before the palace 


492 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


gates ; to see the smiles upon a million mouths, and on 
them all not one smile upon you ; to show yourself hourly 
amoug a mob, that you may buy a little bread to eat, a 
little straw to rest on ! You must be tired, Folle-Farine I’^ 

She was silent where she stood in the moonlight, with 
the clouds seeming to lean and touch her, and far beneath 
the blaze of the myriad of lights shining through the soft 
darkness of the summer night. 

Tired ! — ah, God ! — tired, indeed. But not for any 
cause of which he spake. 

“You must be tired. Now, eat of my golden pear; 
and there, where the world lies yonder at our feet, no 
name shall be on the mouths of men as your name shall 
be in a day. Through the crowds you shall be borne by 
horses fleet as the winds ; or you shall lean above them 
from a gilded gallery, and mock them at your fancy there 
on high in a cloud of flowers. Great jewels shall beam 
on you like planets; and the only chains that you shall 
wear shall be links of gold, like the chains of a priestess 
of old. Your mere wish shall be as a sorcerer's vvand, 
to bring you the thing of your idlest desire. You have 
been despised ! — what vengeance sweeter tlian ‘to see 
men grovel to win your glance, as the swine at the feet 
of Circe ? You have been scorned and accursed I — what 
retribution fuller than for women to behold in you the 
sweetness and magniflcence of shame, and through you, 
envy, and fall, and worship the Evil which begot you ? 
Has humanity been so fair a friend to you that you can 
hesitate to strike at its heart with such a vengeance — so 
symmetrical in justice, so cynical in irony ? Humanity 
cast you out to wither at your birth, — a thing rootless, 
nameless, only meet for the snake and the worm. If you 
bear poison in your fruit, is that your fault, or the fault 
of the human hands that cast the chance-sown weed out 
on the dunghill to perish ? I do not speak of passion. I 
use no anomalous phrase. I am old and ill-favored ; and 
I know that, any way, you will forever hate me. But 
the rage of the desert-beast is more beautiful than the 
meek submission of the animal timid and tame. It is the 
lioness in you that I care to chain ; but your chain shall 
be of gold, Folle-Farine ; and all women will envy. Name 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


493 


your price, set it high as you will ; there is nothing that 
I will refuse. Nay, even I will find your lover, who loves 
not you ; and I will let you have your fullest vengeance 
on him. A noble vengeance, for no other would be 
worthy .of your strength. Living or dead, his genius shall 
be made known to men ; and, before another summer 
comes, all the world shall toss aloft in triumph the name 
that is now nothing as the dust is ; — nothing as you are, 
Folle-Farine I” 

She heard in silence to the end. 

On the height of the roof-tops all was still; the stars 
seemed to beam close against her sight ; below was the 
infinite space of the darkness, in which lines of light glit- 
tered where the haunts of pleasure lay ; all creatures near 
her slept ; the wind-sown plants blew to and fro, rooted 
in the spaces of the stones. 

As the last words died softly on the quiet of the air, in 
answer she reached her hand upward, and broke off a tuft 
of the yellow wall-blossom, and cast it out with one turn 
of her wrist down into the void of the darkness. 

“ What do I say she said, slowly. “What? Well, 
this : I cofild seize you, and cast you down into the dark 
below there, as easily as I cast that tuft of weed. And 
why I hold my hand I cannot tell ; it would be just.” 

And she turned away and walked from him in the 
gloom, slowly, as though the deed she spake of tempted 
her. 


CHAPTER XIV. 

The poverties of the city devoured her incessantly, like 
wolves ; the temptations of the city crouched in wait for 
her incessantly, like tigers. She was always hungry, 
always heartsick, always alone ; and there was always at 
her ear some tempting voice, telling her that she was 
beautiful and was a fool. Yet she never dreamed once 
of listening, of yielding, of taking any pity on herself. 
Was this virtue ? She never thought of it as such ; it 

42 


494 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


was simply instinct ; the instinct of a supreme fidelity, 
in which all slighter and meaner passions were absorbed 
and slain. 

Once or twice, through some lighted casement in some 
lamp-lit wood, where the little gay boats flashed on fairy 
lakes, she would coldly watch that luxury, that indolence, 
that rest of the senses, with a curl on her lips, where she 
sat or stood, in the shadow of the trees. 

“ To wear soft stuffs and rich colors, to have jewels in 
their breasts, to sjeep in satin, to hear fools laugh, to have 
both hands full of gold, that is what women love,” she 
thought ; and laughed a little in her cold wonder, and 
went back to her high cage in the tower, and called the 
pigeons in from the rooftops at sunset, and kissed their 
purple throats, and broke among them her one dry crust, 
and, supperless herself, sat on the parapet and watched 
the round white moon rise over the shining roofs of Paris. 

She was ignorant, she was friendless, she was savage, 
she was very wretched ; but she had a supreme love in 
her, and she was strong. 

A hundred times the Red Mouse tried to steal through 
the lips which hunger, his servile and unfailing minister, 
would surely, the Red Mouse thought, disbar and unclose 
to him sooner or later. 

“ You will tire, and I can wait, Folle-Farine,” the Red 
Mouse had said to her, by the tongue of the old man 
Sartorian; and he kept his word very patiently. 

He was patient, he was wise ; he believed in the power 
of gold, and he had no faith in the strength of a woman. 
He knew how to wait — unseen, so that this rare bird 
should not perceive the net spread for it in its wildness 
and weariness. He did not pursue, nor too quickly in- 
cense, her. 

Only in the dark, cheerless mists, when she rose to go 
among the world of the sleeping poor, at her threshold 
she would step on some gift worthy of a queen’s accept- 
ance, without date or word, gleaming there against the 
stone of the stairs. 

When she climbed to her hole in the roof at the close of 
a day, all pain, all fatigue, all vain endeavor, all bootless 
labor to and fro the labyrinth of streets, there would be 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


495 


on her bare bench such fruits and flowers as Dorothea 
might have sent from Paradise, and curled amidst them 
some thin leaf that would have bought the weight of the 
pines and of the grapes in gold. 

When in the dusk of the night she went, wearily and 
footsore, through the byways and over the sharp-set 
flints of the quarters of the outcasts and the beggars, sick 
with the tumult and the stench and the squalor, parched 
with dust, worn with hunger, blind with the endless search 
for one face amidst the millions, — going home I — oh, 
mockery of the word! — to a bed of straw, to a cage 
in the roof, to a handful of rice as a meal, to a night of 
loneliness and cold and misery ; at such a moment now 
and then through the gloom a voice would steal to her, 
saying, — 

“ Are you not tired yet, Folle-Farine 

But she never paused to hear the voice, nor gave it 
any answer. 

The mill dust ; the reed by the river ; the nameless, 
friendless, rootless thing that her fate made her, should 
have been weak, and so lightly blown by every chance 
breeze — so the Red Mouse told her ; should have asked 
no better ending than to be wafted up a little while upon 
the winds of praise, or woven with a golden braid into a 
crown of pleasure. 

Yet she was so stubborn and would not ; yet she dared 
deride her tempters, and defy her destiny, and be strong. 

For Love was with her. 

And though the Red Mouse lies often in Love’s breast, 
and is cradled there a welcome guest, yet when Love, 
once in a million times, shakes off his sloth, and flings 
the Red Mouse with it from him, he flings with a hand 
of force; and the beast crouches and flees, and dares 
meddle with Love no more. 

In one of the first weeks of the wilder weather, weather 
that had the purple glow of the autumnal storms and the 
chills of coming winter on it, she arose, as her habit was, 
ere the night was altogether spent, and lit her little taper, 
and went out upon her rounds to rouse the sleepers. 

She had barely tasted food for many hours. All the 
means of subsistence that she had was the few coins earned 


496 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


from those as poor almost as herself. Often these went 
in debt to her, and begged for a little time to get the piece 
or two of base metal that they owed her ; and she forgave 
them such debts always, not having the heart to take the 
last miserable pittance from some trembling withered 
hand which had worked through fourscore years of toil, 
and found no payment but its wrinkles in its palm ; not 
having the force to fill her own platter with crusts which 
could only be purchased by the hunger cries of some 
starveling infant, or by the barter of some little valueless 
cross of ivory or rosary of berries long cherished in some 
aching breast after all else was lost or spent. 

She had barely tasted food that day, worst of all she 
had not had even a few grains to scatter to the hungry 
pigeons as they had fluttered to her on the housetop in 
the stormy twilight as the evening fell. 

She had lain awake all the night hearing the strokes of 
the bells sound the hours, and seeming to say to her as 
they beat on the silence, — 

“ Dost thou dare to be strong, thou ? a grain of dust, a 
reed of the river, a Nothing?” 

When she rose, and drew back the iron staple that 
fastened her door, and went out on the crazy stairway, 
she struck her foot against a thing of metal. It glittered 
in the feeble beams from her lamp. She took it up ; it 
was a little precious casket, such as of old the Red Mouse 
lurked in, among the pearls, to spring out from their 
whiteness into the purer snow of Gretchen’s bread. 

With it was only one written line : 

When you are tired, Folle-Farinp ?” 

She was already tired, tired with the horrible thirsty 
weariness of the young lioness starved and cramped in a 
cage in a city. 

An old crone sat on a niche on the wall. She thrust 
her lean bony face, lit with wolf’s eyes, through the gloom. 

“Are you not tired?” she muttered in the formula 
taught her. “Are you not tired, Folle-Farine ?” 

“ If I be, what of that ?” she answered, and she thrust 
the case away to the feet of the woman, still shut, and 
went on with her little dim taper down round the twist 
of the stairs. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


49Y 


She knew what she did, what she put away. She had 
come to know, too, what share the sex of her mother 
takes in the bringing to the lips of their kind the golden 
pear that to most needs no pressing. 

“ If I had only your face, and your chances,’’ had said 
to her that day a serving-girl, young, with sallow cheeks, 
and a hollow voice, and eyes of fever, who lived in a den 
lower down on the stairway. 

“ Are you mad that you hunger here when you might 
hang yourself with diamonds like our Lady of Atocha ?” 
cried a dancing-woman with sullen eyes and a yellow 
skin from the hither side of the mountains, who begged 
in the streets all day. 

So, many tongues hissed to her in different fashions. 
It seemed to many of them impious in one like her to dare 
be stronger than the gold was that assailed her, to dare 
to live up there among the clouds, and hunger, and thirst, 
and keep her silence, and strike dumb all the mouths that 
tried to woo her down, and shake aside all the hands that 
strove softly to slide their purchase-moneys into hers. 

For they chimed in chorus as the bells did : 

Strength in the dust — in a reed — in a Nothing?” 

It was a bitter windy morning ; the rain fell he'avily ; 
there were no stars out, and the air was sharp and raw. 
She was too used to all changes of weather to take heed 
of it, but her thin clothes were soaked through, and her 
hair was drenched as she crossed the courts and traversed 
the passages to reach her various employers. 

The first she roused was a poor sickly woman sleeping 
feverishly on an old rope mat ; the second an old man 
wrestling with nightmare, as the rain poured on him 
through a hole in the roof, making him dream that he 
was drowning. 

The third was a woman, so old that her quarter ac- 
credited her with a century of age; she woke mumbling 
that it was hard at her years to have to go and pick rags 
for a crumb of bread. 

The fourth was a little child not seven ; he was an 
orphan, and the people who kept him sent him out to get 
herbs in the outlying villages to sell in the streets, and 
42* 


498 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


beat him if he let other children be beforehand with him. 
He woke sobbing ; he had dreamed of his dead mother, 
and cried out that it was so cold, so cold. 

There were scores like them at whose doors she knocked, 
or whose chambers she entered. The brief kind night 
was over, and they had to arise and work, — or die. 

“Why do they not die?” she wondered; and she 
thought'of the dear gods that she had loved, the gods of 
oblivion. 

Truly there were no gifts like their gifts ; and yet men 
knew their worth so little ; — but thrust Hypnos back in 
scorn, dashing their winecups in his eyes ; and mocked 
Oneiros, calling him the guest of love-sick fools and of 
mad poets ; and against Thanatos strove always in hatred 
and terror as against their dreaded foe. 

It was a stange, melancholy, dreary labor this into 
which she had entered. 

It was all dark. The little light she bore scarcely shed 
its rays beyond her feet. It was all still. The winds 
sounded infinitely sad among those vaulted passages and 
the deep shafts of the stairways. Now and then a woman’s 
voice in prayer or a man’s in blasphemy echoed dully 
through the old half-ruined buildings. Otherwise an in- 
tense silence reigned there, where all save herself were 
sleeping. - 

She used to think it was a city of the dead, in which 
she alone was living. 

And sometimes she had not the heart to waken them ; 
when there was a smile on some wan worn face that 
never knew one in its waking hours; or when some 
childless mother in her lonely bed sleeping, in fancy drew 
young arms about her throat. 

This morning when all her tasks were done, and all the 
toilers summoned to another day of pain, she retraced her 
steps slowly, bearing the light a]oft, and with its feeble 
rays shed on the colorless splendor of her face, and on her 
luminous dilated troubled eyes that were forever seeking 
what they never found. 

A long vaulted passage stretched between her and the 
foot of the steps that led to the tower ; many doors opened 
on it, the winds wailed through it, and the ragged clothes 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


499 


of the tenants blew to and fro upon the swayin^ cords. 
She traversed it, and slowly mounted her own staircase, 
which was spiral and narrow, with little loopholes ever 
and again that looked out upon the walls, and higher on 
the roofs, and higher yet upon the open sky. By one of 
these she paused and looked out wearily. 

It was dark still ; great low rain-clouds floated by ; a 
little caged bird stirred with a sad note ; mighty rains 
swept by from the westward, sweet with the smell of the 
distant fields. 

Her heart ached for the country. 

It was so still there in the dusk she knew, even in this 
wild autumn night, which there would be so purple with 
leaf shadow, so brown with embracing branches, so gray 
with silvery faint mists of lily, white with virgin snows. 
Ah, God I to reach it once again, she thought, if only to 
die in it. 

And yet she stayed on in this, which was to her the 
deepest hell, stayed on because he — in life or death — 
was here. 

She started as a hand touched her softly, where she 
stood looking through the narrow space. The eyes of 
Sartorian smiled on her through the twilight. 

“Do you shrink still?’’ he said, gently. “Put back 
your knife ; look at me quietly ; you will not have the 
casket? — very well. Your strength is folly; yet it is 
noble. It becomes you. I do you good for ill. I have 
had search made for your lover, who loves not you. I 
have found him.” 

“ Living ?” She quivered from head to foot ; the gray 
walls reeled round her ; she feared, she hoped, she doubted, 
she believed. Was it hell ? Was it heaven ? She could 
not tell. She cared not which, so that only she could 
look once more upon the face of Arslan. 

“ Living,” he answered her, and still he smiled. “ Liv- 
ing. Come with me, and see how he has used the liberty 
you gave. Come.” 

She staggered to her feet and rose, and held her knife 
close in the bosom of her dress, and with passionate 
eyes of hope and dread searched the face of the old man 
through the shadows. 


500 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


“ It is the truth ?” she muttered. “ If you mock me, — 
if you lie ” 

“ Your knife will sheathe itself in my body, I know. 
Nay, I have never lied to you. One cannot wear a velvet 
glove to tame a lioness. Come with me ; fear nothing, 
Folle-Farine. Come with me, and see with your own 
eyesight how the world of men has dealt with this your 
god.” 

“ I will come.” 

Sartorian gazed at her in silence. 

“ You are a barbarian ; and so you are heroic always. 
I would not lie to you, and here I have no need. Come; 
it is very near to you. A breadth of stone can sever two 
lives, though the strength of all the world cannot unite 
them. Come.” 

She gripped the knife closer, and, with feet that stum- 
bled as the feet of a dumb beast that goes out to its 
slaughter, followed him, through the dark and narrow 
ways. She had no fear for herself; she had no dread 
of treachery or peril ; for herself she could be strong, 
always ; and the point of the steel was set hard against 
her breast ; but for him ? — had the gods forgotten ? had 
he forgot? 

She was sick, and cold, and white with terror as she 
went. She dreaded the unknown thing her eyes might 
look upon. She dreaded the truth that she had sought 
to learn all through the burning months of summer, all 
through the horrors of the crowded city. Was it well 
with him, or ill? Had the gods remembered at last? 
Had the stubborn necks of men been bent to his feet ? 
Was he free ? — free to rise to the heights of lofty desire, 
and never look downward, in pity, once ? 

They passed in silence through many passage-ways of 
the great stone hive of human life in which she dwelt. 
Once only Sartorian paused and looked back and spoke. 

“ If you find him in a woman’s arms, lost in a sloth of 
passion, what then ? Will you say still. Let him have 
greatness ?” 

In the gloom he saw her stagger as though struck upon 
the head. But she rallied and gazed at him in answer 
with eyes that would neither change nor shrink. 


FOLLE-FARINE, 


501 


“ What is that to you she said, in her shut teeth. 

Show me the truth ; and as for him, — he has a right to 
do as he will. Have I said ever otherwise?’’ 

He led the way onward in silence. 

This passion, so heroic even in its barbarism, so faith- 
ful even in its wretchedness, so pure even in its abandon- 
ment, almost appalled him, — and yet on it he had no 
pity. 

By his lips the world spoke ; the world which, to a 
creature nameless, homeless, godless, friendless, offered 
only one choice — shame or death ; and for such privilege 
of choice bade her be thankful to men and to their deity. 

He led her through many vaulted ways, and up the 
shaft of a stone stairway in a distant side of the vast 
pile, which, from holding many habitants of kings, and 
monks, and scholars, had become the populous home of 
the most wretched travailers of a great city. 

“Wait here,” he said, and drew her backward into a 
hollow in the wall. It was nearly dark. 

As she stood there in the darkness looking down 
through the narrow space, there came a shadow to her 
through the gloom, — a human shadow, noiseless and 
voiceless. It ascended the shaft of the stairs with a 
silent, swift tread, and passed by her, and went onward ; 
as it passed, the rays of her lamp were shed on it, and 
her eyes at last saw the face of Arslkn. 

It was pale as death ; his head was sunk on his 
breast ; his lips muttered without the sound of words, his 
fair hair streamed in the wind ; he moved without haste, 
without pause, with the pulseless haste, the bloodless 
quiet of a phantom. ^ 

She had heard men talk of those who, being dead, yet 
dwelt on earth and moved amidst the living. She had 
no thought of him in that moment save as among the 
dead. But he, dead or living, could have no horror for 
her ; he, dead or living, ruled her as the moon the sea, 
and drew her after him, and formed the one law of her 
life. 

She neither trembled nor prayed, nor wept nor laughed, 
nor cried aloud in her inconceivable joy. Her heart 
stood still, as though some hand had caught and gripped 


502 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


it. She was silent in the breathless silence of an un- 
speakable awe ; and with a step as noiseless as his own, 
she glided in his path through the deep shaft of the stairs, 
upward and upward through the hushed house, through 
the innumerable chambers, through the dusky shadows, 
through the chill of the bitter dawn, through the close hive 
of the sleeping creatures, up and up, into the very roof 
itself, where it seemed to meet the low and lurid clouds, and 
to be lifted from the habitations and the homes of men. 

A doorway was open ; he passed through it ; beyond 
it was a bare square place through which there came the 
feeblest rays of dawn, making the yellow oil flame that 
burned in it look dull and hot and garish. He passed 
into the chamber and stood still a moment, with his head 
dropped on his chest and his lips muttering sounds with- 
out meaning. 

The light fell on his face ; she saw that he was living. 
Crouched on his threshold, she watched him, her heart 
leaping with a hope so keen, a rapture so intense, that 
its very strength and purity suffocated her like some 
mountain air too pure and strong for human lungs to 
breathe. 

He walked in his sleep ; that sleep so strange and so 
terrible, which drugs the senses and yet stimulates the 
brain ; in which the sleeper moves, acts, remembers, re- 
turns to daily habits, and resorts to daily haunts, and yet 
to all the world around him is deaf and blind and in- 
different as the dead. 

The restless brain, unstrung by too much travail and 
too little food, had moved the limbs unconsciously to 
their old haunts and habits; and in his sleep, though 
sightless and senseless, he seemed still to know and still 
to suffer. For he moved again, after a moment’s rest, 
and passed straight to the wooden trestles on which a 
great canvas was outstretched. He sank down on a 
rough bench in front of it, and passed his hand before the 
picture with the fond, caressing gesture with which a 
painter shows to another some wave of light, some grace 
of color, and then sat there, stupidly, steadfastly, with 
bis elbows on his knees and his head on his hands, and 
his eyes fastened on the creation before him. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


603 


It was a rugged, desolate, wind-blown chamber, set in 
the topmost height of the old pile, beaten on by all 
snows, drenched by all rains, rocked by all storms, bare, 
comfortless, poor to the direst stretch of poverty, close 
against the clouds, and with the brazen bells and teeming 
roofs of the city close beneath. 

She had dwelt by him for many weeks, and no sense 
of his presence had come to her, no instinct had awakened 
in him towards the love which clung to him with a faith- 
fulness only as great as its humility. She, praying 
always to see this man once more, and die — had been 
severed from him by the breadth of a stone as by an 
ocean’s width ; and he — doomed to fail always, spending 
his life in one endeavor, and by that one perpetually 
vanquished — he had had no space left to look up at a 
nameless creature with lithe golden limbs, about whose 
head the white-winged pigeons fluttered at twilight on 
the housetop. 

His eyes had swept over her more than once ; but they 
had had no sight for her ; they were a poet’s eyes that 
saw forever in fancy faces more amorous and divine, 
limbs lovelier and more lily-like, mouths sweeter and more 
persuasive in their kiss, than any they ever saw on 
earth. 

One passion consumed him, and left him not pause, 
nor breath, nor pity, nor sorrow for any other thing. 
He rested from his work and knew that it was good ; 
but this could not content him, for this his fellow-men 
denied. 

There was scarcely any light, but there was enough 
for her to read bis story by — the story of continual 
failure. 

Yet where she hid upon the threshold, her heart beat 
with wildest music of recovered joy ; she had found him, 
and she had found him alone. 

No woman leaned upon his breast ; no soft tossed hair 
bathed his arms, no mouth murmured against his own. 
He was alone. Her only rival was that one great pas- 
sion with which she had never in her humility dreamed 
to mete herself. 

Head he might be to all the world of men, dead in his 


504 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


own sight by a worse fate than that or any could give; 
but for her he was living, — to her what mattered failure 
or scorn, famine or woe, defeat or despair ? 

She saw his face once more. 

She crouched upon his threshold now, and trembled 
with the madness of her joy, and courted its torture. She 
dared not creep and touch bis hand, she dared not steal 
and kneel a moment at his feet. 

He had rejected her. He had had no need of her. He 
had left her with the first hour that freedom came to him. 
He had seen her beauty, and learned its lines and hues,' 
and used them for his art, and let it go again, a soulless 
thing that gave him no delight ; a thing so slight he had 
thought it scarcely worth bis while even to break it for 
an hour’s sport. This was what be had deemed her ; 
that she knew. 

She accepted the fate at his hands with the submission 
that was an integral part of the love she bore him. She 
had never thought of equality between herself and him ; 
he might have beaten her, or kicked her, as a brute his 
dog, and she would not have resisted nor resented. 

To find him, to watch him from a distance, to serve 
him in any humble ways she might; to give him his 
soul’s desire, if any b4rter of her own soul could pur- 
chase it, — this was all she asked. She had told him that 
he could have no sins to her, and it had been no empty 
phrase. 

She crouched on his threshold, scarcely daring to 
breathe lest he should hear her. 

In the dull light of dawn and of the sickly lamp she saw 
the great canvas on the trestles that his eyes, without 
seeing it, yet stared at ; — it was the great picture of the 
Barabbas, living its completed life in color: beautiful, 
fearful, and divine, full of its majesty of godhead and its 
mockery of man. 

She knew then how the seasons since they had parted ’ 
had been spent with him ; she knew then, without any 
telling her in words, how he had given up all his nights 
and days, all his scant store of gold, all leisure and com- 
fort and peace, all hours of summer sunshine and of mid- 
night cold, all laughter of glad places, and all pleasures 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


505 


of passion or of ease, to render perfect this one work by 
which he had elected to make good his fame or perish. 

And she knew that he must have failed ; failed always ; 
that spending his life in one endeavor, circumstance had 
been stronger than he, and had baffled him perpetually, 
She knew that it was still in vain that he gave his peace 
and strength and passions, all the golden years of man- 
hood, and all the dreams and ddights of the senses ; and 
that although these were a treasure which, once spent, 
came back nevermore to the hands which scatter them, 
he had failed to purchase with them, though they were 
his all, this sole thing which he besought from the way- 
wardness of fate. 

“ I will find a name or a grave,” he had said, when 
they had parted : she, with the instinct of that supreme 
love which clung to him with a faithfulness only equaled 
by its humility, needed no second look upon his face to 
see that no gods had answered him save the gods of ob- 
livion ; — the gods whose pity he rejected and whose 
divinity he denied. 

For to the proud eyes of a man, looking eagle-wise at 
the far-off sun of a great ambition, the coming of Than- 
atos could seem neither as consolation nor as vengeance, 
but only as the crowning irony in the mockery and the 
futility of life. 

The dawn grew into morning. 

A day broke full of winds and of showers, with the 
dark masses of clouds tossed roughly hither and thither, 
and the bells of the steeples blown harshly out of time 
and tune, and the wet metal roofs glistening through a 
steam of rain. 

The sleepers wakened of themselves or dreamed on as 
they might. 

She had no memory of them. 

She crouched in the gloom on his threshold, watching 
him. 

He sank awhile into profound stupor, sitting there 
before his canvas, with his head dropped and his eyelids 
closed. Then suddenly a shudder ran through him ; he 
awoke with a start, and shook off the lethargy which 

43 


506 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


drugged him. He rose slowly to his feet, and looked at 
the open shutters, and saw that it was morning. 

“Another day — another day!” he muttered, wearily; 
and he turned from the Barabbas. 

Towards the form on his threshold he had never looked. 

She sat without and waited. 

Waited — for what? She did not know. She did not 
dare even to steal to him and touch his hand with such 
a timid caress as a beaten dog ventures to give the hand 
of the master who has driven it from him. 

For even a beaten dog is a creature less humble and 
timid than a woman that loves and whose love is re- 
jected. 

He took up a palette ready set, and went to a blank 
space of canvas and began to cover it with shapes and 
shadows on the unconscious creative instinct of the sur- 
charged brain. Faces and foliage, beasts and scrolls, the 
heads of gods, the folds of snakes, forms of women rising 
from flames and clouds, the flowers of Paradise blossom- 
ing amidst the corruption and tortures of Antenora. All 
were- cast in confusion, wave on wave, shape on shape, 
horror with loveliness, air with flame, heaven with hell, 
in all the mad tumult of an artist’s dreams. 

With a curse he flung his brushes from him, and cast 
himself face downward on his bed of straw. 

The riot of fever was in his blood. Famine, sleepless 
nights, unnatural defiance of all passions and all joys, 
the pestilence rife in the crowded quarter of the poor, — 
all these had done their work upon him. He had breathed 
in the foul air of plague-stricken places, unconscious of 
its peril ; he had starved his body, reckless of the flight 
of time ; he had consumed his manhood in one ceaseless, 
ruthless, and absorbing sacrifice; and Nature, whom he 
had thus outraged, and thought to outrage with impunity 
as mere bestial feebleness, took her vengeance on him 
and cast him here, and mocked him, crying, — 

“A deathless name ? — Oh, madman I A little breath on 
the mouths of men in all the ages to come ? — Oh, fool I 
Hereafter you cry ? — Oh, fool I — heaven and earth may 
pass away like a scroll that is burnt into ashes, and the 
future you live for may never come — neither for you nor 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


50T 


the world. What you may gain — who shall say ? But 
all you have missed, I know. And no man shall scorn 
me — and pass unscathed.” 

There came an old lame woman by, laboriously bearing 
a load of firewood. She paused beside the threshold. 

“ You look yonder,” she said, resting her eyes on the 
stranger crouching on the threshold. “ Are you anything 
to that man ?” 

Silence only answered her. 

“ He has no friends,” muttered the cripple. “ No hu- 
man being has ever come to him ; and he has been here 
many months. He will be mad — very soon. I have 
seen it before. Those men do not die. Their bodies are 
too strong. But their brains go, — look you. And their 
brains go, and yet they live — to fourscore and ten many 
a time — shut up and manacled like wild beasts.” 

Folle-Farine shivered where she crouched in the shadow 
of the doorway ; she still said nothing. 

The crone mumbled §n indifferent of answer, and yet 
pitiful, gazing into the chamber. 

“ I have watched him often ; he is fair to look at — one 
is never too old to care for that. All winter, spring, and 
summer he has lived so hard; — so cold too and so silent 
— painting that strange thing yonder. He looks like a 
king — be lives like a beggar. The picture was his god : — - 
see you. And no doubt he has set his soul on fame — 
men will. All the world is mad. One day in the spring- 
time it was sent somewhere — that great thing yonder on 
the trestles, — to be seen by the world, no doubt. And 
whoever its fate lay with would not see any greatness in 
it, or else no eyes would look. It came back as it went. 
No doubt they knew best; — in the world. That was in 
the spring of the year. He has been like this ever since. 
Walking most nights ; — starving most days ; — I think. 
But he is always silent.” 

The speaker raised her wood and went slowly, mutter- 
ing as she limped down each steep stair, — 

There must hang a crown of stars I suppose — some- 
where — since so many of them forever try to reach one. 
But all they ever get here below is a crown of straws in 
a madhouse.” 


508 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


“ The woman says aright,” the voice of Sartorian mur- 
mured low against her ear. 

She had forgotten that he was near from the first mo- 
ment that her eyes had once more fed themselves upon 
the face of Arslan. 

“ The woman says aright,” he echoed, softly. “ This 
man will perish ; his body may not die, but his brain will 
— surely. And yet for his life you would give yours?” 

She looked up with a gleam of incredulous hope ; she 
was yet so ignorant ; she thought there might yet be 
ways by which one life could buy another’s from the 
mercy of earth, from the pity of heaven. 

“ Ah I” she murmured with a swift soft trembling 
eagerness. “ If the gods would but remember ! — and 
take me — instead. But they forget — they forget always.” 

He smiled. 

“ Ay, truly, the gods forget. But if you would give 
yourself to death for him, why not do a lesser thing ? — 
give your beauty, Folle-Farine?’/ 

A scarlet flush burned her from head to foot. For 
once she mistook his meaning. She thought, how could 
a beauty that he — who perished there — had scorned, 
have rarity or grace in those cold eyes, of force or light 
enough to lure him from his grave ? 

The low melody of the voice in her ear flowed on. 

“ See you — what he lacks is only the sinew that gold 
gives. What he has done is great. The world rightly 
seeing must fear it ; and fear is the highest homage the 
world ever gives. But he is penniless ; and he has many 
foes ; and jealousy can with so much ease thrust aside the 
greatness which it fears into obscurity, when that great- 
ness is marred by the failures and the feebleness of pov- 
erty. Genius scorns the power of gold : it is wrong ; 
gold is the war scythe on its chariot, which mows down 
the millions of its foes and gives free passage to the sun- 
coursers, with which it leaves those heavenly fields of 
light for the gross battle-fields of earth.” 

“You were to give that gold,” she muttered, in her 
throat. 

“ Nay, not so. I was to set him free : to find his fame 
or his grave ; as he might. He will soon find one, no 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


509 


doubt. Nay; you would make no bond with me, Folle- 
Farine. You scorned my golden pear. Otherwise — how 
great they are I That cruel scorn, that burning color, 
that icelike coldness I If the world could be brought to 
see them once aright, the world would know that no 
powers greater than these have been among it for many 
ages. But who shall force the world to' look ? — who ? 
It is so deaf, so slow of foot, so blind, unless the film be- 
fore its eyes be opened by gold.” 

He paused and waited. 

She watched silent on the threshold there. 

The cruel skill of his words cast on her all the weight 
of this ruin which they watched. 

Her love must needs be weak, her pledge to the gods 
must needs be but imperfectly redeemed, since she, who 
had bade them let her perish in his stead, recoiled from 
the lingering Fiving death of any shame, if such could 
save him. 

The sweet voice of Sartorian murmured on : 

“ Nay ; it were easy. He has many foes. He daunts 
the world and scourges it. Men hate him, and thrust 
him into oblivion. Yet it were easy I — a few praises to 
the powerful, a few bribes to the base, and yonder thing 
once lifted up in the full light of the world, would make 
him great — beyond any man’s dispute — forever. I c6uld 
do it, almost in a day ; and he need never know. But, 
then, you are not tired, Folle-Farine 1” 

She writhed from him, as the doe struck to the ground 
writhes from the hounds at her throat. 

“ Kill me I” she muttered. “ Will not that serve you ? 
Kill me — and save him 1” 

Sartorian smiled. 

“Ah 1 you are but weak, after all, Folle-Farine. You 
would die for that man’s single sake, — so you say ; and 
yet it is not him whom you love. It is yourself. If this 
passion of yours were great and pure, as you say, would 
you pause ? Could you ask yourself twice if what you 
think your shame would not grow noble and pure beyond 
all honor, being embraced for his sake? Nay; you are 
weak, like all your sex. You would die, so you say. To 
say it is easy ; but to live, that were harder. You will 


510 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


not sacrifice yourself — so. And yet it were greater far, 
Folle-Farine, to endure for his sake in silence one look of 
his scorn, than to brave, in visionary phrase, the thrusts 
of a thousand daggers, the pangs of a thousand deaths. 
Kill you ! vain words cost but little. But to save him by 
sacrifice that he shall never acknowledge ; to reach a 
heroism which he shall ever regard as a cowardice ; to 
live and see him pass you by in cold contempt, while in 5mur 
heart you shut your secret, and know that you have given 
him his soul’s desire, and saved the genius in him from a 
madman’s cell and from a pauper’s grave — ah I that is 
beyond you ; beyond any woman, perhaps. And yet 
your love seemed great enough almost to reach such a 
height as this, I thought.” 

He looked at her once, then turned away. 

He left in her soul the barbed sting of romorse. He 
had made her think her faith, her love, her strength, her 
sinless force, were but the cowardly fruit of crudest self- 
love, that dared all things in words — yet in act failed. 

To save him by any martyrdom of her body or her 
soul, so she had sworn ; yet now 1 — Suddenly she seemed 
base to herself, and timorous, and false. 

When daybreak came fully over the roofs of the city, 
it found him senseless, sightless, dying in a garret : the 
only freedom that he had reached was the delirious lib- 
erty of the brain, which, in its madness, casts aside all 
bonds of time and place and memory and reason. 

All the day she watched beside him there, amidst the 
brazen clangor of the bells and scream of the rough 
winds above the roofs. 

In the gloom of the place, the burning color of the 
great canvas of Jerusalem glowed in its wondrous pomp 
and power against all the gray, cold poverty of the 
wretched place. And the wanton laughed with her lover 
on the housetop ; and the thief clutched the rolling gold ; 
and the children lapped the purple stream of the wasted 
wine ; and the throngs flocked after the thief, whom they 
had elected for their god ; and ever and again a stray, 
flickering ray of light flashed from the gloom of the deso- 
late chamber, and struck upon it till it glowed like flame ; 
— this mighty parable, whereby the choice of the people 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


511 


was symbolized for all time ; the choice eternal, which 
never changes, but forever turns from all diviner life to 
grovel in the dust before the Beast. 

The magnificence of thought, the glory of imagina- 
tion, the radiance of color which the canvas held, served 
only to make more naked, more barren, more hideous the 
absolute desolation which reigned around. Notone grace, 
not one charm, not one consolation, had been left to the 
life of the man who had sacrificed all things to the 
inexorable tyranny of his genius. Destitution, in its 
ghastliest and most bitter meaning, was alone his recom- 
pense and portion. Save a few of the tools and pig- 
ments of his art, and a little opium in a broken glass, 
there was nothing there to stand between him and utter 
famine. 

When her eyes had first dwelt upon him lying sense- 
less under the gaze of the gods, be had not been more 
absolutely destitute than he was now. The hard sharp 
outlines of his fleshless limbs, the sunken temples, the 
hollow cheeks, the heavy respiration which spoke each 
breath a pang, — all these told their story with an elo- 
quence more cruel than lies in any words. 

He had dared to scourge the world without gold in his 
hand wherewith to bribe it to bear his stripes ; and the 
world had been stronger than he, and had taken its ven- 
geance, and had cast him here powerless. 

All the day through she watched beside him — watched 
the dull mute suffering of stupor, which was only broken 
by fierce unconscious words muttered in the unknown 
tongue of his birth-country. She could give him no aid, 
no food, no succor ; she was the slave of the poorest of 
the poor ; she had not upon her even so much as a copper 
piece to buy a crust of bread, a stoup of wine, a little 
cluster of autumn fruit to cool her burning lips. She 
had nothing, — she, who in the world of men had dared 
to be strong, and to shut her lips, and to keep her hands 
clean, and her feet straight ; she, whose soul had been, 
closed against the Red Mouse. 

If she had gone down among the dancing throngs, and 
rioted with them, and feasted with them, and lived vilely, 
they would have hung her breast with gems, and paved 


512 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


her path with gold. That she knew ; and she could have 
saved him. 

Where she kneeled beside his bed she drew his hands 
against her heart, — timidly, lest consciousness should 
come to him and he should curse her and drive her thence 
— and laid her lips on them, and bathed them in the 
scorching dew of her hot tears, and prayed him to par- 
don her if it had been weakness in her, — if it had been 
feebleness and self-pity thus to shrink from any abase- 
ment, any vileness, any martyrdom, if such could have 
done him service. 

She did not know ; she felt astray and blind and full of 
guilt. It might be — so she thought — that it was thus the 
gods had tested her ; thus they had bade her suffer shame 
to give him glory ; thus they had tried her strength, — 
and found her wanting. 

Herself, she was so utterly nothing in her own sight, 
and he was so utterly all in all ; her life was a thing so 
undesired and so valueless, and his a thing so great and 
so measureless in majesty, that it seemed to her she might 
have erred in thrusting away infamy, since infamy would 
have brought with it gold to serve him. 

Dignity, innocence, strength, pride — what right had she 
to these, what title had she to claim them — she who had 
been less than the dust from her birth upward ? 

To perish for him anyhow — that was all that she had 
craved in prayer of the gods. And she watched him 
now all through the bitter day ; watched him dying of 
hunger, of fever, of endless desire, of continual failure, — 
and was helpless. More helpless even than she had been 
when first she had claimed back his life from Thanatos. 

Seven days she watched thus by him amidst the metal 
clangor of the bells, amidst the wailing of the autumn 
winds between the roofs. 

She moistened his lips with a little water ; it was all he 
took. A few times she left him and stole down amidst 
the people whom she had served, and was met by a curse 
from most of them ; for they thought that she tended 
some unknown fever which she might bring amidst them, 
so they drove her back, and would hear naught of her. 
A few, more pitiful than the rest, flung her twice or thrice 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


513 


a little broken bread ; she took it eagerly, and fed on it, 
knowing that she must keep life in her by some food, or 
leave him utterly alone. For him she had laid down all 
pride ; for him she would have kissed the feet of the 
basest or sued to the lowest for alms. 

And when the people — whose debts to her she had 
often forgiven, and whom she had once fancied had borne 
her a little love — drove her from them with harshest re- 
viling, she answered nothing, but dropped her head and 
turned and crept again up the winding stairs to kneel be- 
side his couch of straw, and wonder, in the bewildered 
anguish of her aching brain, if indeed evil were good, — 
since evil alone could save him. 

Seven days went by ; the chimes of the bells blown on 
the wild autumn winds in strange bursts of jangled 
sound ; the ceaseless murmur of the city’s crowd surging 
ever on the silence from the far depths below ; sunrise 
and moonrise following one another with no change in 
the perishing life that she alone guarded, whilst every day 
the light that freshly rose upon the world found the pic- 
ture of the Barabbas, and shone on the god rejected and 
the thief adored. 

Every night during those seven days the flutelike voice 
of her tempter made its hated music on her ear. It asked 
always, — 

“Are you tired, Folle-Farine 

Her ears were always deaf ; her lips were always 
dumb. 

On the eighth night he paused a little longer by her in 
the gloom. 

“ He dies there,” he said, slowly resting his tranquil, 
musing gaze upon the bed of straw. “ It is a pity. So 
little would save him still. A little wine, a little fruit, 
a little skill, — his soul’s desire when his sense returns. 
So little — and he would live, and he would be great; 
and the secret sins of the Barabbas would scourge the 
nations, and the nations, out of very fear and very shame, 
would lift their voices loud and hail him prophet and 
seer.” 

Her strength was broken as she heard. She turned 
and flung herself in supplication at his feet. 


614 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


So little— so little ; and you hold your hand I’^ 

Sartorian smiled. 

“Nay; you hold your silence, Eolle-Farine.’’ 

She did not move; her upraised face spoke without 
words the passion of her prayer. 

“ Save him I — save him I So little, so you say ; and 
the gods will not hear.” 

“ The gods are all dead, Folle-Farine.” 

“ Save him 1 You are as a god I Save him I” 

“ I am but a mortal, Folle-Farine. Can I open the 
gates of the tomb, or close them 

“ You can save him, — for you have gold.” 

He smiled still. 

“ Ah I you learn at last that there is but one god I You 
have been slow to believe, Folle-Farine I” 

She clung to him ; she writhed around him ; she kissed 
with her soilless lips the base dust at his feet. 

“ You hold the keys of the world ; you can save the life 
of his body ; you can give him the life of his soul. You 
are a beast, a devil, a thing foul and unclean, and without 
mercy, and cruel as a lie ; and therefore you are the thing 
that men follow, and worship, and obey. I know ! — 
know I You can save him if you will 1” 

kjhe laughed where she was stretched upon the ground, 
a laugh that stayed the smile upon his mouth. 

He stooped, and the sweetness of his voice was low 
and soft as the south wind. 

“ I will save him, if you say that you are tired, 
Folle-Farine.” 

Where she was stretched face downward at his feet she 
shuddered, as though the folds of a snake curled round 
her, and stifled, and slew her with a touch. 

“ I cannot !” she muttered faintly in her throat. 

“ Then let him die !” he said ; and turned away. 

Once again he smiled. 

The hours passed ; she did not move ; stretched there, 
she wrestled with her agony as the fate-pursued wrestled 
with their doom on the steps of the temple, while the 
dread Eumenides drew round them and waited — waiting 
in cold patience for the slow sure end. 

She arose and went to his side as a dying beast in the 


FOLLE-FARINE, 


515 


public roadway under a blow staggers to its feet to 
breathe its last. 

“ Let him die !” she muttered, with lips dry as the lips 
of the dead. “Let him die 1” 

Once more the choice was left to her. So men said : 
and the gods were dead. 

An old man, with a vulture’s eyes and bony fingers, 
and rags that were plague-stricken with the poisons of 
filth and of disease, had followed and looked at her in the 
doorway, and kicked her where she lay. 

“ He owes me twenty days for the room,” he muttered, 
while his breath scorched her throat with the fumes of 
drink. “A debt is a debt. To-morrow I will take the 
canvas; it will do to burn. You shiver? — fool I If 
you chose, you could fill this garret with gold this very 
night. But you love this man, and so you let him perish 
while you prate of ‘ shame.’ Oh-ho I that is a woman I” 

He went away through the blackness and the stench, 
muttering, as he struck his staff upon each stair, — 

“ The picture will feed the stove ; the law will give me 
that.” 

She heard and shivered, and looked at the bed of straw, 
and on the great canvas of the Barabbas. 

Before another day had come and gone, he ivould lie 
in the common ditch of the poor, and the work of his 
hand would be withered, as a scroll withers in a flame. 

If she tried once more ? If she sought human pity, 
human aid ? Some deliverance, some mercy — who could 
say ? — might yet be found, she thought. The gods were 
dead ; but men, — were they all more wanton than the 
snake, more cruel than the scorpion ? 

For the first time in seven days she left his side. 

She rose and staggered from the garret, down the 
stairway, into the lower stories of the wilderness of 
wood and stone. 

She traced her way blindly to the places she had 
known. They closed their doors in haste, and fled from 
her in terror. 

They had heard that she had gone to tend some mad- 
man, plague-stricken with some nameless fever; and 
those wretched lives to life clung closely, with a frantic 
ove. 


616 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


One woman she stayed, and held with timid, eager 
hands. Of this woman she had taken nothing all the 
summer long in wage for waking her tired eyes at day- 
break. 

“ Have pity I” she muttered. “ You are poor, indeed, 
I know ; but help me. He dies there I’’ 

The woman shook her off, and shrank. 

“ Get you gone I” she cried. “ My little child will 
sicken if you breathe on her 

The others said the same, some less harshly, some more 
harshly. Twice or thrice they added : 

“You beg of us, and send the jewels back ? Go and 
be wise. Make your harvest of gold whilst you can. 
Reap while you may in the yellow fields with the sharp, 
sure sickle of youth 1” 

Not one among them braved the peril of a touch of 
pity ; not one among them asked the story of her woe ; 
and when the little children ran to her, their mothers 
plucked them back, and cried, — 

“ Art mad ? She is plague-stricken.’^ 

She went from them in silence, and left them, and 
passed out into the open air. 

In all this labyrinth of roofs, in all these human herds, 
she yet thought, “ Surely there must be some who pity 

For even yet she was so young ; and even yet she 
knew the world so little. 

She went out into the streets. 

Her brain was on fire, and her heart seemed frozen ; 
her lips moved without sound, and unconsciously shaped 
the words which night and day pursued her, “ A little 
gold, — a little gold I” 

So slight a thing, they said, and yet high above reach 
as Aldebaran, when it glistened through the storm-wrack 
of the rain. 

Why could he have not been content — she had been — 
with the rush of the winds over the plains, the strife of 
the flood and the hurricane, the smell of the fruit-hung 
ways at night, the cool, green shadows of the summer 
woods, the courses of the clouds, the rapture of the keen 
air blowing from the sea, the flight of a bird over the 
tossing poppies, the day-song of the lark ? All these were 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


517 


life enough for her ; were freedom, loveliness, companion- 
ship, and solace. Ah, God 1 she thought, if only these 
had made the world of his desires likewise. And even 
in her ghastlier grief her heart sickeued for them in vain 
anguish as she went, — these the pure joys of earth and 
air which were her only heritage. 

She went out into the streets. 

It was a night of wind and rain. 

The lamps flickered through the watery darkness. 
Beggars, and thieves, and harlots jostled her in the nar- 
row ways. 

“It must be hell, — the hell of the Christians,” she 
muttered, as she stood alone on the flints of the roads, in 
the rancid smell, in the hideous riot, in the ghastly mirth, 
in the choking stench,' in the thick steam of the darkness, 
whose few dull gleams of yellow light served to show 
the false red on a harlot’s cheek, or the bleeding wound 
on a crippled horse, or the reeling dance of a drunkard. 

It was the hell of the Christians: in it there was no 
hope for her. 

She moved on with slow unconscious movement of her 
limbs ; her hair blew back, her eyes had a pitiless won- 
der in their vacant stare; her bloodless face had the horror 
in it that Greek sculptors gave to the face of those whom 
a relentless destiny pursued and hunted down ; ever and 
again she looked back as she went, as though some name- 
less, shapeless, unutterable horror were behind her in her 
steps. 

The people called her mad, and laughed and hooted 
her ; when they had any space to think of her at all. 

“ A little food, a little wine, for pity’s sake,” she mur- 
mured ; for her own needs she had never asked a crust 
in charity, but for his, — she would have kissed the mud 
from the feet of any creature who would have had thus 
much of mercy. 

In answer they only mocked her, some struck her in 
the palm of her outstretched hand. Some called her by 
foul names; some seized her with a drunken laugh, and 
cursed her as she writhed from their lewd hold ; some, 
and these often women, whispered to her of the bagnio 
and the brothel; some muttered agaiifst her as a thief; 

44 


518 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


one, a youth, who gave her the gentlest answer that she 
had, murmured in her ear, “ A b^eggar ? with that face ? 
come tarry with me to-night.’^ 

She went on through the sulphurous yellow glare, and 
the poisonous steam of these human styes, shuddering 
from the hands that grasped, the voices that wooed her, 
the looks that ravished her, the laughs that mocked her. 

It was the hell of the Christians : it was a city at mid- 
night; and its very stones seem to arise and give tongue 
in her derision and cry, “Oh, fool, you dreamt of a sacri- 
fice which should be honor ; of a death, which should be 
release ; of a means whereby through you the world 
should hear the old songs of the gods ? Oh, fool I We 
are Christians here ; and we only gather the reeds of the 
river to bruise them and break them, and thrust them, 
songless and dead, in the name of our Lord.’’ 

She stumbled on through the narrow ways. 

After a little space they widened, and the lights multi- 
plied, and through the rushing rains she saw the gay 
casements of the houses of pleasure. 

On the gust of wind there came a breath of fragrance 
from a root of autumn blossom in a balcony. The old 
fresh woodland smell smote her as with a blow ; the 
people in the street looked after her. 

“ She is mad,” they said to one another, and went 
onward. 

She came to a broad place, which even in that night of 
storm was still a blaze of fire, and seemed to her to laugh 
through all its marble mask, and all its million eyes of 
golden light. A cruel laugh which mocked and said, — 

“ The seven chords of the lyre ; who listens, who cares, 
who has ears to hear ? But the rod of wealth all women 
kiss, and to its rule all men crawl ; forever. You dreamt 
to give him immortality ?— fool I Give him gold — give 
him gold 1 We are Christians here; and we have but 
one God.” 

Under one of the burning cressets of flame there was a 
slab of stone on which were piled, bedded in leaves, all 
red and gold, with pomp of autumn, the fruits of the 
vine in great clear pyramids of white and purple ; tossed 
there so idly in such profusion from the past vintage- 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


519 


time, that a copper coin or two could buy a feast for half a 
score of mouths. Some of the clusters rotted already 
from their over-ripeness. 

She looked at them with the passionate woeful eyes of 
a dog mad with thirst, which can see water and yet 
cannot reach it. She leaned towards them, she caught 
their delicious coldness in her burning hands, she breathed 
in their old familiar fragrance with quick convulsive 
breath. 

“ He dies there I” she muttered, lifting her face to the 
eyes of the woman guarding them. “ He dies there ; 
would you give me a little cluster, ever such a little one, 
to cool his mouth, for pity’s sake ?” 

The woman thrust her away, and raised, shrill and 
sharp through all the clamor of the crowd, the cry of 
thief. 

A score of hands were stretched to seize her, only the 
fleetness of her feet saved her. She escaped from them, 
and as a hare flies to her form, so she fled to the place 
whence she came. 

She bad done all she could ; she had made one effort, 
for his sake ; and all living creatures had repulsed her. 
None would believe ; none would pity ; none would hear. 
Her last strength was broken, her last faint hope had 
failed. 

In her utter wretchedness she ceased to wonder, she 
ceased to revolt, she accepted the fate which all men 
told her was her heritage and portion. 

“It was I who was mad,” she thought; “so mad, so 
vain, to dream that I might ever be chosen as the reed 
was chosen. If I can save him, anyhow, what matter, 
what matter for me ?” 

She went back to the place where he lay— dying, un- 
less help came to him. She climbed the stairway, and 
stole through the foulness and the darkness of the wind- 
ing ways, and retraced her steps, and stood upon his 
threshold. 

She had been absent but one hour ; yet already the 
last, most abject, most wretched penalty of death had 
come to him. They robbed him in his senselessness. 

The night was wet. The rain dropped through the 


520 ^ FOLLE-FARINE. 

roof. The rats fought on the floor and climbed the walls. 
The broken lattice blew to and fro with every gust of 
wind. 

A palsied crone, with ravenous hands, sheared the 
locks of his fair hair, muttering, “ They will fetch a stoup 
of brandy ; and they would take them to-morrow in the 
dead-house.” 

The old man who owned the garret crammed into a 
wallet such few things of metal, or of wood, or of paper 
as were left in the utter poverty of the place, muttering, 
as he gathered the poor shreds of art, “ They will do to 
burn ; they will do to burn. At sunrise I will get help 
and carry the great canvas down.” 

The rats hurried to their holes at the light ; the hag 
let fall her shears, and fled through an opening in the 
wall. 

The old man looked up and smiled with a ghastly leer 
upon her in the shadows. 

“ To-morrow I will have the great canvas,” he said, 
as he passed out, bearing his wallet with him. “ And 
the students will give me a silver bit, for certain, for that 
fine corpse of his. It will make good work for their 
knives and their moulding-clay. And he will be dead to- 
morrow ; — dead, dead.” 

And he grinned in her eyes as be passed her. A 
shiver shook her ; she said nothing ; it seemed to her as 
though she would never speak again. 

She set down her lamp, and crossed the chamber, and 
kneeled beside the straw that made his bed. 

She was quite calm. 

She knew that the world gave her one chance — one 
only. She knew that men alone reigned, and that the 
gods were dead. 

She flung herself beside him on the straw and wound 
her arms about him, and laid his head to rest upon her 
heart; one moment — be would never know. 

Between them there would be forever silence. He 
would never know. 

Greatness would come to him, and the dominion of 
gold; and the work of his hands would pass amidst the 
treasures of the nations; and he would live and arise 


FOLLE-FARINE, 


521 


and say, ^‘The desire of my heart is mine;” — and yet he 
would never know that one creature had so loved him 
that she had perished more horriblynhan by death to 
save him. 

If he lived to the uttermost years of man, he would 
never know how, body and soul, she had passed away to 
destruction for his sake. 

To die with him I 

She laughed to think how sweet and calm such sacri- 
fice as that had been. 

Amidst the folded lilies, on the white waters, as the 
moon rose, — she laughed to think how she had sometimes 
dreamed to slay herself in such tender summer peace for 
him. That was how women perished whom men loved, 
and loved enough to die with them, their lips upon each 
other’s to the last. But she 

Death in peace ; sacrifice in honor ; a little memory in 
a human heart ; a little place in a great hereafter ; these 
were things too noble for her — so they said. 

A martyrdom in shame ; a life in ignominy — these were 
all to which she might aspire — so they said. 

Upon his breast women would sink to sleep ; among 
his hair their hands would wander, and on his mouth 
their sighs would spend themselves. Shut in the folded 
leaves of the unblossomed years some dreams of passion 
and some flower of love must lie for him — that she knew. 

She loved him with that fierce and envious force which 
grudged the wind its privilege to breathe upon his lips, 
the earth its right to bear his footsteps, which was forever 
jealous of the mere echo of his voice, avaricious of the 
mere touch of his hand. And when she gave him to the 
future, she gave him to other eyes, that would grow blind 
with passion, meeting his ; to other forms, that would 
burn with sweetest shame beneath his gaze ; to other lives, 
whose memories would pass with his to the great Here- 
after, made immortal by his touch ; all these she gave, she 
knew. 

Almost it was stronger than her strength. Almost she 
yielded to the desire which burned in her to let him die, 

and die there with him, — and so hold him forever hers, 

and not the world’s ; his and none other’s in the eternal 
44 * 


522 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


union of the grave, so that with hers his beauty should be 
consumed, and so that with hers his body should be shut 
from human sight, •and the same corruption feed together 
on their hearts. 

Almost she yielded ; but the greatness of her love was 
stronger than its vileness, and its humility was more per- 
fect than its cruelty. 

It seemed to her — mad, and bruised, and stunned with 
her misery — that for a thing so worthless and loveless 
and despised as she to suffer deadliest shame to save a 
life so great as his was, after all, a fate more noble than 
she could have hoped. For her — what could it matter ? — 
a thing baser than the dust, — whether the feet of men 
trampled her in scorn a little more, a little less, before she 
sank away into the eternal night wherein all things are 
equal and all things forgotten. 


CHAPTER XV. 

That night the moon found the Red Mouse, and said, — 
“ Did I not declare aright ? Over every female thing 
you are victorious — soon or late 
But the Red Mouse answered, — 

“ Nay, not so. For the soul still is closed against me ; 
and the soul still is pure. But this men do not see, and 
women cannot know ;-^they are so blind. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


523 


CHAPTER XYL 

Ere anoth-er year had been fully born, the world spoke 
in homage and in wonder of two things. 

The one, a genius which had suddenly arisen in its 
midst, and taken vengeance for the long neglect of bitter 
years, and scourged the world with pitiless scorn until, 
before this mighty struggle which it had dared once to 
deride and to deny, it crouched trembling; and wondered 
and did homage ; and said in fear, “ Truly this man is 
great, and truth is terrible.’^ 

The other, — the bodily beauty of a woman ; a beauty 
rarely seen in open day, but only in the innermost re- 
cesses of a sensualist’s palace; a creature barefooted, 
with chains of gold about her ankles, and loose white 
robes which showed each undulation of the perfect limbs, 
and on her breast the fires of a knot of opal ; a creature 
in whose eyes there Was one changeless look, as of some 
desert beast taken from the freedom of the air and cast 
to the darkness of some unutterable horror ; a creature 
whose lips were forever mute, mute as the tortured lips 
of Laena. 

One day the man whom the nations at last had 
crowned, saw the creature whom it was a tyrant’s 
pleasure to place beside him now and then, in the 
public ways, as a tribune of Rome placed in his chariot 
of triumph the vanquished splendor of some imperial 
thing of Asia made his slave. 

Across the clear hot light of noon the eyes of Arslan 
fell on hers for the first time since they had looked on 
her amidst the pale poppies, in the noonrise, in the fields. 

They smiled on her with a cold, serene, ironic scorn. 

“ So soon ?” he murmured, and passed onward, whilst 
the people made way for him in homage. 

He had his heart’s desire. He was great. He only 
smiled to think — all women were alike. 


524 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


Her body shrank, her head dropped, as though a knife 
were thrust into her breast. 

But her lips kept their silence to the last. They were 
so strong, they were so mute ; they did not even once 
cry out against him, “ For thy sake I” 


CHAPTER XYII. 

In the springtime of the year three gods watched by 
the river. 

The golden willows blew in the low winds ; the waters 
came and went ; the moon rose full and cold over a sil- 
very stream ; the reeds sighed in the silence. Two win- 
ters had drifted by, and one hot, drowsy summer ; and all 
the white still shapes upon the walls of the granary 
already had been slain by the cold breath of Time. The 
green weeds waved in the empty casements ; the chance- 
sown seeds of thistles and of bell-flowers were taking leaf 
between the square stones of the paven floors ; on the 
deserted threshold lichens and brambles climbed together ; 
the filmy ooze of a rank vegetation stole over the loveli- 
ness of Persephone and devoured one by one the immortal 
offspring of Zeus ; about the feet of the bound sun-king 
in Phaeros and over the calm serene mockery of Hermes’ 
smile the gray nets of the spiders’ webs had been woven 
to and fro, around and across, with the lacing of a 
million threads, as Fate weaves round the limbs and 
covers the eyes of mortals as they stumble blindly from 
their birthplace to their grave. All things, the damp 
and the dust, the frost and the scorch, the newts and the 
rats, the fret of the flooded water, and the stealing sure 
inroad of the mosses that everywhere grew from the 
dews and the fogs had taken and eaten, in hunger or 
sport, or had touched and thieved from, then left gan- 
grened and ruined. 

The three gods alone remained, who, being the sons of 
eternal night, are unharmed and unaltered by any passage 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


525 


of the years of earth, — the only gods who never bend 
beneath the yoke of Time, but unblenchingly behold the 
nations wither as uncounted leaves, and the lands and 
the seas change places, and the cities and the empires 
pass away as a tale that is told, and the deities that are 
worshiped in the temples change name and attributes and 
cultus at the wanton will of the age that begat them. 

In the still, cold moonlit air they stand together hand 
in hand, looking outward through the white night-mists. 
Other gods perished with the faith of each age as it 
changed ; other gods lived by the breath of men’s lips, 

the tears of prayer, the smoke of sacrifice ; but they 

their empire is the universe. In every young soul that 
leaps into the light of life, rejoicing blindly, Oneiros has 
dominion, and he alone. In every creature that breathes, 
from the conqueror resting on a field of blood to the nest- 
bird cradled in its bed of leaves, Hypnos holds a sover- 
eignty which nothing mortal can long resist and live. 
And Thanatos — to him belongs every created thing, past, 
present, and to come ; beneath his foot all generations 
lie, and in the hollow of his hand he holds the worlds. 
Though the earth be tenantless, and the heavens sunless, 
and the planets shrivel in their courses, and the universe 
be desolate in an endless night, yet through the eternal 
darkness Thanatos still will reign, and through its 
eternal solitudes he alone will wander and he still behold 
his work. 

Deathless as themselves, their shadows stood ; and the 
worm and the lizard and the newt left them alone and 
dared not wind about their calm clear brows, and dared 
not steal to touch the roses at their lips, — knowing that 
ere the birth of the worlds these were, and when the 
worlds shall have perished they still will reign on, — the 
slow, sure, soundless, changeless ministers of an eternal 
rest, of an eternal oblivion. 

A little light strayed in from the gray skies, pale as 
the primrose-flowers that grow among the reeds upon 
the shore, and found its way to them trembling, and 
shone in the far-seeing depths of their unfathomable eyes. 

To eyes which spake and said : “ Sleep, Dreams, and 
Death we are the only gods that answer prayer.” 


526 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


With the faint gleam of the tender evening light there 
came across the threshold a human form, barefooted, 
bareheaded, with broken links of golden chains gleaming 
here and there upon her limbs, with white robes hanging 
heavily, soaked with dews and rains ; with sweet familiar 
smells of night-born blossoms, of wet leaves, of budding 
palm-boughs, of rich dark seed-sown fields, and the white 
flower-foam of orchards shedding their fragrance from 
about her as she moved. 

Her face was bloodless as the faces of the gods ; her 
eyes had a look of blindness, her lips were close-locked 
together; her feet stumbled often, yet her path was 
straight. 

She had hidden by day, she had fled by night; all 
human creatures had scattered from her path, in terror 
of her as of some unearthly thing: she had made her 
way blindly yet surely through the sweet cool air, 
through the shadows and .the grasses, through the sigh- 
ing sounds of bells, through the leafy ways, through the 
pastures where the herds were sleeping, through the 
daffodils blowing in the shallow brooks ; — through all 
the things for which her life had been athirst so long and 
which she reached too late, — too late for any coolness of 
sweet grass beneath her limbs to give her rest ; too late 
for any twilight song of missel-thrush or merle to touch 
her dumb dead heart to music ; too late for any kiss of 
clustering leaves to heal the blistering shame that burned 
upon her lips and withered all their youth. And yet she 
loved them, — loved them never yet more utterly than 
now when she came back to them, as Persephone to the 
pomegranate-flowers of hell. 

She crossed the threshold, whilst the reeds that grew 
in the water by the steps bathed her feet and blew to- 
gether softly against her limbs, sorrowing for this life so 
like their own, which had dreamed of the songs of the 
gods and had only heard the hiss of the snakes. 

She fell at the feet of Thanatos. The bonds of her 
silence were loosened ; the lips dumb so long for love’s 
sake found voice and cried out : 

“ How long ? — how long ? Wilt thou never take pity, 
and stoop, and say, ‘ Enough’ ? I have kept faith, I have 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


627 


kept silence, to the end. The gods know. My life for 
his; my soul for his; so I said. So I have given. I 
would not have it otherwise. Nay, I am glad, I am 
content, I am strong. See, — I have never spoken. The 
gods have let me perish in his stead. Nay, I suffer 
nothing. What can it matter — for me ? Nay, I thank 
thee that thou hast given my vileness to be the means of 
his glory. He is immortal, and I am less than the dust ; 
— what matter? He must not know; he must never 
know ; and one day I might be weak, or mad, and speak. 
Take me whilst still I am strong. A little while agone, 
in the space in the crowds he saw me. ‘ So soon V ho 
said, — and smiled. And yet I live 1 Keep faith with 
me; keep faith — at last. Slay me now, — quickly, — for 
pity’s sake I Just once, — I speak.” 

Thanatos, in answer, laid his hand upon her lips, and 
sealed them, and their secret with them, mute, for ever- 
more. 

She had been faithful to the end. 

To such a faith there is no recompense, of m^n or of 
the gods, save only death. On the shores of the river 
the winds swept through the reeds, and, sighing amidst 
them, mourned, saying, “A thing as free as we are, and 
as fair as the light, has perished ; a thing whose joys 
were made, like ours, from song of the birds, from sight 
of the sun, from sound of the waters, from smell of the 
fields, from the tossing spray of the white fruit-boughs, 
from the play of the grasses at sunrise, from all the 
sweet and innocent liberties of earth and air. She has 
perished as a trampled leaf, as a broken shell, as a rose 
that falls in the public ways, as a star that' is cast down 
on an autumn night. She.has died as the dust dies, and 
none sorrow. What matter ? — what matter ? Men are 
wise, and gods are just, — they say.” 

The moon shone cold and clear. The breath of the 
wild thyme was sweet upon the air. The leaves blew 
together murmuring. The shadows of the clouds were 
dark upon the stream'. She lay dead at the feet of the 
Sons of Night. , . , 

The Red Mouse sat without, and watched, and said, 
To the end she hath escaped me.” The noisome creat- 


528 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


ures of the place stole away trembling; the nameless 
things begotten by loneliness and gloom glided to their 
holes as though afraid ; the blind newts crept into the 
utter darkness afar off ; the pure cool winds alone 
hovered near her, and moved her hair, and touched her 
limbs with all the fragrance of forest and plain, of the pure 
young year and the blossoming woodlands, of the green 
garden-ways and the silvery sea. The lives of the earth 
an(i the air and the waters alone mourned for this life which 
was gone from amidst them, free even in basest bondage, 
pure though every hand had cast defilement on it, in- 
corrupt through all corruption — for love’s sake. 


CHAPTER XVIII 

In the springtime of the year three reapers cut to the 
roots the reeds that grew by the river. 

They worked at dawn of day: the skies were gray 
and dark ; the still and misty current flowed in with a 
full tide ; the air was filled with the scent of white fruit- 
blossoms ; in the hush of the daybreak the song of a lark 
thrilled the silence; under the sweep of the steel the 
reeds fell. 

Resting from their labors, with the rushes slain around 
them, they, looking vacantly through the hollow case- 
ments, saw her body lying there at the feet of the gods 
of oblivion. 

At first they were shaken and afraid. Then the gleam 
of the gold upon her limbs awakened avarice ; and avarice 
was more powerful than fear. They waded through the 
rushes and crossed the threshold, and, venturing within, 
stood looking on her in awe and Wonder, then timorously 
touched her, and turned her face to the faint light. Then 
they said that she was dead. 

“ It is that evil thing come back upon us 1” they mut- 
tered to one another, and stood looking at one another, 
and at her, afraid. 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


529 


They spoke in whispers ; they were very fearful ; it 
was still twilight. 

“ It were a righteous act to thrust her in a grave,’’ 
they murmured to one another at the last, — and paused. 

“Ay, truly,” they agreed. “ Otherwise she may break 
the bonds of the tomb, and rise again, and haunt us 
always : who can say ? But the gold ” 

And then they paused again. 

“It were a sin,” one murmured, — “it were a sin’ to 
bury the pure good gold in darkness. Even if it came 
from hell ” 

“ The priests will bless it for us,” answered the other 
twain. 

Against the reddening skies the lark was singing. 

The three reapers waited a little, still afraid, then 
hastily, as men slaughter a thing they dread may rise 
against them, they stripped the white robes from hej 
and drew olf the anklets of gold from her feet, and the 
chains of gold that were riven about her breast and 
limbs. When they had stripped her body bare, they 
were stricken with a terror of the dead whom they thus 
violated with their theft; and, being consumed with 
apprehension lest any, as the day grew lighter, should 
pass by there and see what' they had done, they went 
out in trembling haste, and together dug deep down into 
the wet sands, where the reeds grew, and dragged her 
still warm body unshrouded to the air, and thrust it 
down there into its nameless grave, and covered it, and 
left it to the rising of the tide. 

Then with the gold they hurried to their homes. 

The waters rose and washed smooth the displaced 
soil, and rippled in a sheet of silver as the sun rose over 
the place, and effaced all traces of their work, so that no 
man knew this thing which they had done. 

In her death, as in her life, she was friendless and 
alone ; and none avenged her. 

The reeds blew together by the river, now red m the 
daybreak, now white in the moonrise; and the winds 
sighed through them wearily, for they were songless, 
and the gods were dead. 

The seasons came and went ; the waters rose^ and 
45 


530 


FOLLE-FARINE. 


sank; in the golden willows the young birds made music 
with their wings ; the soft-footed things of brake and 
brush stole down through the shade of the leaves and 
drank at the edge of the shore, and fled away; the people 
passed down the slow current of the stream with lily 
sheaves of the blossoming spring, with ruddy fruitage of 
the summer woods, with yellow harvest of the autumn 
fields, — passed singing, smiting the frail songless as they 
went. 

But none paused there. 

For Tbanatos alone knew, — Thanatos, who watched 
by day and night the slain reeds sigh, fruitless and root- 
less, on the empty air, — Thanatos, who by the cold sad 
patience of his gaze spoke, saying, — 

“I am the only pity of the world. And even I — to 
every mortal thing I come too early or too late.” 


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book that may be depended on for com- 
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great desideranda in such an undertak- 
ing.” — From Pro/. Jas. Russell Low- 
ell. 

“ It is the most valuable work of the 
kind in English that I have seen.”- -From 
Gen. R. E. Lee, Washington College. 


Special Circulars, containing a full description of the work, with 
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PUBLICATIONS OF J. B. LTPPINCOTT <Sr> CO. 


Bulwer's Novels. Globe Edition. Comflete tn 

twenty-two volumes. With Frontispiece to each volume. Beau- 
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top, $66; half calf, gilt extra, $66. Each novel sold separately, 
as below, in extra cloth, at $1.50 per volume. 


The Caxtons i vol. 

My Novel 2 vols. 

What will He Do with It ?..2 vols. 

Devereux. i vol. 

East Days of Pompeii 1 vol. 

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Harold I vol. 

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*‘ We repeat what we have so often be- 
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Zanoni i vol. 

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A Strange Story i voL ^ 


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Readds Novels. Illustrated Standard Edition of 
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bound in extra cloth. Price, $15 per set Extra cloth, gilt topii 
$17 per set Sold separately, in extra cloth, as follows : 


Hard Cash 

.$1.75 

Love me Little Love me 

Long 


Never too Late to Mend. 

• 1.75 

White Lies 

. 1.50 

Foul Play 



The Cloister and the Hearth$i.75 


Griffith Gaunt 1.50 

Peg Woffington 1.25 

Chri.stie Johnstone 1.25 


The Course of True Love 
Never did Run Smooth. i.2'> 


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The Old Mam’selle’s Secret. After the 

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A more charming story, and one which, 

5?vmg once commenced, it seemed more 
difl&cult to leave, we have not met with for 
many a day.”— Round Table. 

Is one of the most intense, concentrated, 
compact novels of the day. . . . And the 
work has the minute fidelity of the author 




r> j j L ’ , uuiiy Of 

graphic power of Georet 
£lliot. JotiVfuil, 

“ Appears to be one of the most interest- 
mg stones that we have had from Emop« 
for many a da.'j,"— Boston Traveler. 


Gold Elsie* From the German of E. Marlitt^ 

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Ouida' s Novelettes, First Series, Cecil Castle- 

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“Ouida’s” Popular Tales and Stories. i2mo. Cloth, each ^*ii.75- 


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her reputation as a novelist, and these 
short stories contrif-'ite largely to the stock 


of pleasing narratives and adventures alive 
to the memory of all who are given tv 
romance and fiction.” — N. Haven Jour. 


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